He does say that he has long liked Lisp, and that he generally liked Scheme, so he already had his feet wet. And although the documentation is, well, scarce, he did read through the source code file arc.arc.
"I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like."
I mean, come ON. If Lisp wasn't compelling enough because of the perceived lack of libraries, then Arc is the last way to come back to Lisp as it has NIL.
It's completely acceptable to have a preferred Lisp, but it's unacceptable to do so for irrational reasons ;-) Every time you need a new library/feature in Arc you're most likely to call out to the MzScheme runtime and FFI. It's highly hypocritical of you to dismiss a language for lack of libraries, then jump on another language it hosts.
Public technical rationales aught to be a little more than "just cuz" and personal preference. If you wanted a discussion that is ..
The features of Arc are well described in the Arc tutorial, http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt would you recommend that I include a link to that?
it doesn't stand well under scrutiny ... public technical rationales aught to be a little more than ...
Well, I had posted it to the Arc forum, where people are already familiar with Arc. I expect that your criticism is valid if it had been intended to be a technical article.
I think you've misunderstood this sentence, which explains why you don't understand the logic.
He is dismissing Lisp because [library pain] is not alleviated by [compelling language features]. For him, in Arc, [compelling language features] do alleviate [library pain], so he is happy to use Arc. This logic is fine even if the [library pain] in Arc is actually worse than the [library pain] he experienced in Lisp, because [compelling language features] differs too.
So, no hypocrisy. You could still argue that he should have experienced less library pain in Lisp than he did experience, or that Lisp might have compelling features that he overlooked, or even that library pain cannot in principle be alleviated by language features, though I won't comment there.