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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Is Paul Graham and Robert Morris's Arc language[a] being used for anything in production other than Y Combinator websites?

[a] http://arclanguage.org/

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I'm curious about this too.

There still seems to be interest in the project. The forum gets new topics posted every few days [1] and Anarki, a community ran fork of Arc, shows recent commits [2].

[1] http://arclanguage.org/forum

[2] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

Hubski was originally based off the HN code and continued development in Arc (https://hubski.com/pub?id=126759).

They were converting from Arc to Racket, but I don't know how much ended up being done (https://github.com/hubski/hubski/wiki/Converting-Arc-functio...).

https://www.laarc.io/ uses it. It's a HN clone created by an ex-employee from S2 (which develops Heroes of Newerth, a Dota clone). It's available on github as well. https://github.com/laarc/laarc

Looks like a fork of HN, so not really created by this S2 ex-employee.

I don't think so, although as the sibling says there is hobby activity. Interestingly enough, though, reddit was originally written in arc, but they later rewrote it in python. Make of that what you will.

Reddit was written in Common Lisp, not Arc.

As sibling said, reddit was CL before it was Python. But more importantly, reddit predates Arc by more than two years. :)

And the main reason reddit was rewritten was library support. Doing simple things in CL was hard because you had to write it from scratch, but doing those things in Python was a simple library install.

I'm curious because I thought the main draw of CL was that it was easy as heck to roll your own library support.

It's easy to roll anything in CL if you know what you're doing, but making it talk wsgi or generate pngs isn't trivial, no matter what language you're writing it in.

CL implementations do have an FFI that you could at least call C libraries from, don't they?

I think so? I honestly don't know, I never really worked with the CL codebase, I just used it for reference sometimes. But even if it did, I'm not sure how much velocity is gained by using CL vs. Python, especially when making a web app, where there are so many examples, libraries, and frameworks out there to help in Python.

While I have admittedly limited experience with it, CFFI worked awesome for the couple things I tried to do with it. I don't have any CL code in production yet, but enjoy using it when I'm doing some recreational programming, or looking for something that's easy to embed in a C program (Lua's nice, but it's trivial to take the ECL Common Lisp implementation and hook up emacs-slime to it, even when it's embedded in a C program)

Lisp shines for codegen and creating DSLs and new control structures, but if you're just writing out tedious imperative code, it isn't really better than Python. Its lack of popularity means it can't offer as many libraries waiting to be reused.

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