Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc | Hacker News Reader

Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc

chartophylax.blogspot.com

31 pointsrml30 comments

Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.

I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.

Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive.

I don't think Paul Graham ever said that unicode was not important. I bet he thinks it great. But, right now I think he thinks there are more productive (and more fun) ways to spend his development time. I bet he is right.

The annoying part is about the "complaining", as PG's followers are entitled to anything, just because they feel they are part of the cult.

Guess what? You don't get the right to complain. Nobody does. Nobody has paid a support contract for anyone to include Unicode support on the language.

The guy wrote a language for himself. Not for you, not for me. And he does not want to work on Unicode support. I bet he doesn't want to work on database abstraction. Or Ajax widgets. Or whatever.

If those are so important to you, go somewhere else. But please, stop complaining.

EDIT: bad wording. As bct put it, complain all you want, but don't feel in the right to demand anything.

> You don't get the right to complain.

Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to demand.

Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to have our demands met.

At least in the US, that pesky first amendment does give them the right to complain. :) I certainly agree that pure complaining is annoying, but bring on the well-articulated critiques!

Also, I don't think that PG wrote Arc just for himself. I think he wrote the language that he himself wanted, but that's not the same thing. If Arc was only for him, then why release it to the world? I think what he wants is the best of both worlds -- lots of users, with no support burden. Eventually, the users won't stand for this, but while Arc is still an infant, it makes a lot of sense.

> If Arc was only for him, then why release it to the world?

To get people to stop pestering him?

Given all the discussion on Hacker News and elsewhere, that is obviously not the reason.

I think the argument can be summed up as follows: pg - Arc is an exploratory language, meant to appeal to hackers so they can create great things with it. various sw devs - But we need Unicode support and W3C compliance

How do these requests support the goals of Arc? I think it's funny that people have started complaining about these things (which aren't core to a language) instead of thinking about what kind of cool stuff they can build.

Why does a language that furthers the notion of software as art have to conform to existing conventions?

The cool stuff I want to build happens to involve languages with diacritics. And strings are (or should be) core to programming languages.

Just an observation: No one complains that Brainfuck lacks strings, and they have fun playing with that. Software doesn't have to be about building things that are useful in the everyday. I can think of plenty of programs to write that don't involve strings.

In fact, I can see one great use for Arc already: a more "hip and modern" language than Scheme that you can convince students to demand they be taught (instead of Blub.) I could envision a version of the SICP written for it by, say, _why.

I don't argue that lacking Unicode support makes the language more artistic. In fact, I don't even argue that Arc is artistic -- only that its author(s) didn't intend to adhere to any particular standards or tastes of our own age (which is what technicians might do), aiming instead to create a useful tool for "sketching out" computations (which is what artists might do). That all seems very clear from the statement on the Arc site.

I can not believe you linked to yourself!

It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.

The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it.

He actually spent time to write that bullshit? I really hate articles that offense their readers.

All these people he mentions were lead to create something out of need or by a strike of genious, and I don't see this guy getting either of both.

Unicode is not a luxury, is a need.

Supported or not by Arc at this version or in the future, is another issue and if the community needs it, a totally another one.

But leaving a language without builtin support for Unicode, its destiny not far should it be from ending up like what is to day to writting C++ in Windows, which is a tottally NIGHTMARE to handle strings as there more than 10 different types.

I don't think anybody attacked Arc or its creatos by stating their "dumb" needs!

http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they

Interestingly enough, in the three months the above link has been around, I've found it germane to something like four threads on Hacker News.

This is open source, people. If you need something, add it yourself. This is a Lisp for God's sake, you can actually add syntax to the language!

In general, grumble, but don't be obnoxious about gaps unless you're paying the developer for the privilege.

The Tao of Steve applied to free and open-source software:

1) Be desireless; 2) Be excellent; 3) Be gone.

If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII character was used.

Perhaps you should try reading one not written in English?

If I remember correctly, Ruby doesn't have Unicode support either. Shit, some languages don't even have built-in strings.

I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from those mistakes.

Seems like some languages are getting the point. While looking for a resource about Unicode support, I saw promising things as well as inauspicious. Seems like multibyte character support would be a good thing to catalog for programming languages (specs as well as implementations)

Ruby doesn't, but it's regarded as a mistake and (afaik) is fixed in 1.9.

That is especially ironic when you consider that its creator is Japanese. So let me get this right... a language designed by a non-native-English-speaking individual can gain massive popularity without Unicode support, but an American who has no interest in Unicode is supposed to do it anyways? How does that make sense?

Ruby has always had excellent support for Japanese, though.

bingo. the japanese don't like unicode.

Because of UniHan?

You can use Unicode in Ruby 1.8, it's just not very convenient.

"In other words, CS guys, you must (gasp!) acknowledge that you don't know everything."

Is he still gasping? (He forgot his closing tag.)

Oh that's right, CS guys don't know everything.

It's really curious that so many people are so pessimistic about something they get for free...

Me simply is playing around a little every now and then, and it's giving me much, much fun! It brings me back the feeling when I first started learning Lisp!

So my summary is clear: nice!, great!, fun!! (And I'll omit a 'hallelujah' here...)

boring. don't read.

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