Comment by vsingh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vsingh | Hacker News Reader

Is Arc a success on the same scale as Viaweb or Y Combinator?

In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, was influenced to some extent by Arc.

In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.

But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:

"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it."

So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators hasn't sprung up yet.

I prefer it to Scheme or Common Lisp. But while I've spent a decent amount of time on news.arc, I haven't spent much lately on the underlying language.

It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once. I can't work on YC, writing, and hacking. And since YC is a given, that means I have to choose between writing and hacking. Over the last couple years I've mostly chosen writing, but that might change.

Which reminds me, I really should do a new release of news.arc. It's significantly better now.

It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once.

Huh. That reminds me of a rule I figured out a long time ago: you have two cards to play. As in: Job, school, family, startup, pick 2. (Though startup really wants both.)

I'll be interested to see if having a child increases your capacity for simultaneous serious projects. It had that effect on me. I think it does that because you're forced to do lots of context switching, and eventually get better at it.

So far that hasn't happened.

I was just thinking about how much faster HN has been lately. It's pretty rare to get a timeout, or even have to wait for a page to load. It's one of those things that I guess you don't really notice until the other sites you visit start getting slow again (ahem, reddit).

Anyways, thanks for keeping it fast!

Has any of the news.arc goodness trickled down into arc.arc? It'd be cool to see arc3.2.

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