This sort of thing certainly helps to explain why Lisp is threatened with extinction in the wild.
Should I become a new member of the Lisp community, where my every contribution will be greeted with insults, derision, and snobbery? Or should I just learn PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, or C? Suddenly, the decision that most people make seems pretty darned rational.
One of the biggest advantages that Arc has over the myriad other Lisps is that PG actually wants new users.
I agree. I think the way forward is to just completely nuke the Lisp community from orbit and start from scratch. There are a few kind folks on comp.lang.lisp, but for me, I'm going to pretend that the world began last week, and the only Lisp community that exists is on the arclanguage.org forum.
I read a book called "The 10 differences between the middle class and millionaires," I think the first difference the author makes is that the middle class talks about people and millionaires talk about ideas.
This has stuck with me and I generally try to avoid conversations that are about people...
I'm not sure what this has to do about the article but this is a comment that just stood up and yelled to get my attention. From the millionaires I've met, I seem to find that they tell a story that relates to the point they are making. And they're not afraid to admit their weaknesses. And they talk about ideas.
Digging through a few of the other threads there, a complaint about using = as a generalized set was among the best example of complaints I've seen about arc yet. Using = promotes proggramming in a non functional style (apparently), but lisp is multiparadigm anyway. I have yet to read what the paradigm of arc is supposed to be, but my assumptions are, whatever one you want.
Every popular Lisp dialect has assignment. They can't have been complaining about that. The gripe must have been with my choice of = as the name for assignment.
At the risk of meriting this story with a response, from what I've read, I was under the impression that Arc was not implemented as an interpreter, but rather, using macros. This would mean Arc has more of a compiler implementation (Arc => PLT) than an interpreter. Am I wrong about this?
(It's on my list to read the source code, but haven't yet.)
I was just being a jerk. All i know of this person is he made some comment about REST being a good idea 5 years ago.
Perhaps he is, in fact, a great luminary in language design circles. Pretty much though, this seems like some comment on some mailing list by some guy... not much different than some guy at some bar saying something about sports.
Sorry for the confusion. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
Should I become a new member of the Lisp community, where my every contribution will be greeted with insults, derision, and snobbery? Or should I just learn PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, or C? Suddenly, the decision that most people make seems pretty darned rational.
One of the biggest advantages that Arc has over the myriad other Lisps is that PG actually wants new users.