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21 pointspg18 comments

Thanks Robert Morris & PG!

When will ARC be available (It's looking pretty exciting)? What problems are you solving that take it beyond CL?

I am as big an Arc fan as the next guy, but I can't say it looks any more exciting than PHP. I am highly interested in it being released, however. It seems to me that if you're at the point where you're rewriting internals for speed, you're at the point where it works well enough to be released. If you just release it without any guarantees or claims about its goodness, sure you might get bashed all over the internet, but also a lot of people would use it and modify it for themselves, and maybe some of said improvements might be useful to you. The YC admissions cycle is over, so maybe you have time to do this now.

If Arc ends up looking like PHP then I think it's fair to say that Paul's going to get bashed pretty badly indeed.

I know Arc is way better than PHP and was even before it existed (IMO a language that doesn't exist is better than PHP). My point in the first sentence was that all we can see of Arc is this web page, a replica of which could be created in PHP with little or no change in the user experience.

Anyway, the bashing part would presumably be because some of it isn't finished, or because people don't understand some of his decisions that he didn't explain, not because the language is bad. I theorize based on what's been written about it that Arc is a quite nice language to use, particularly for Lispers.

Did you hear that the Inkling guys are rewriting their entire site in it? It must be ok.

Uhmm... that was an April Fool's joke. Not sure if you intended for there to be sarcasm in your post.

A little too dry I guess today. It was a good April Fool's joke though.

Well, the YC funding process has just moved from application to interview stage, so they have a little while to go there.

You're right about the expectations, though. I mischievously wonder if it should be initially released in a source form that requires a lot of work to get it running. That way you skew things away from casual users who aren't going to get much out of it, and towards enthusiasts who will be congratulating themselves for building it or finding some weird RPM of it on BitTorrent.

Is arc self-hosting, a bunch of Common Lisp macros, or implemented in some other language? How long until arc is self-hosting? :)

It's written in mzscheme. I don't know exactly what self-hosting means, but PG did write his own web server, and he said he very much wouldn't want to deal with Reddit-sized traffic, so I expect he runs everything on his own computers.

Self hosting = interpreter/compiler for the language written in the language itself.

It "compiles" into mzscheme. But the compilation is more like macroexpansion.

Ok, this truly piques my interest in Scheme. (If only we could get our hands on ARC!.)

I'm curious, does a 2-3x increase in speed very perceptibly better the user experience? I can understand a 15 second to 5 second reduction. What about a 2 second to 0.6 second reduction? What about balancing by faster hardware?

(asking because it's directly relevant to me)

Before the upgrade, if you were to load a page with alot of comments, there was a noticeable delay. That is no longer the case.

The extra speed would have been nice yesterday, while the emails were going out. I doubt I was the only one who noticed the site slow down as we all refreshed compulsively. :-)

Would it be good experience to learn Mz. Scheme as a primer before ARC is released?

Definitely learn a Lisp, but I doubt the release version of Arc will still use mz.

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