Arc Programming Language
In 2001, Paul Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named "Arc". Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.
In the essay Being Popular Graham describes a few of his goals for the language. While many of the goals are very general ("Arc should be hackable," "there should be good libraries"), he did give some specifics. For instance, he believes that it is important for a language to be terse:
It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.
He also stated that it is better for a language to only implement a small number of "axioms", even when that means the language may not have features that large organizations want, such as object-orientation (OO). In fact, Graham feels that OO is not useful as its methods and patterns are just "good design", and he sees the language features used to implement OO as partially mistaken.
A controversy among Lisp programmers is whether, and how much, the S-expressions of the language should be complemented by other forms of syntax. Graham feels that additional syntax should be used in situations where pure S-expressions would be overly verbose, saying, "I don't think we should be religiously opposed to introducing syntax into Lisp." Graham also feels that efficiency problems should be solved by giving the programmer a good profiler.
The first publicly released version of Arc was made available on 29 January 2008. The release comes in the form of a .tar archive, containing the Racket source code for Arc. A tutorial and a discussion forum are also available. The forum is copied from news.ycombinator.com and is written itself in Arc.
The initial version caused some controversy, by only supporting the ASCII character set, and by shipping with a built-in web application library that bases its layout on HTML tables. This, combined with the hype surrounding Arc and its generally slow development pace, has gathered some unfavorable comments.
Read more about this topic: Paul Graham (computer Programmer)
Famous quotes containing the words arc, programming and/or language:
“You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.”
—Joan Of Arc (c.1412–1431)
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)