Wasn't Arc meant to be a toy/academic language?
Wasn't Unix written to play Space Travel ( http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~lib215/reference/history... )?
What a gem! nice find!
What's happening with Arc?
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Graham cares about having a better programming language, but he doesn't really care enough to do what it takes to make it happen. (He has no obligation to do so, of course.) Practical programming languages these days aren't just ways of expressing "algorithms," but toolkits for marshalling the vast information processing resources around the world (people, libraries, net protocols, platforms from microcontroller to s…
My goal from the beginning was to continue where JMC left off: to continue building Lisp up from axioms till I have a more complete language. I've compromised a bit to make it something runnable, which I think you need in order to test out your ideas on programs of substantial length. But "practical programming" is not in itself the main goal. Paradoxical as it sounds, that may be the way to end up with the best lang…
Wasn't McCarthy working on a model that's more elegant than Turing machines?
As far as axioms go, you can't get simpler than the Turing machine: it doesn't even have a notion of a variable, let alone types or strings.
I don't know about the history of Lisp other from what I've read from you, but it seems what McCarthy was working on was a more elegant model, rather than an "axiomatically pure" model.
Arc on the other hand, is trying to compete with Ruby and Python.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#33Personally I have a hard time seeing what the goal for Arc would be. "100 year language" seems pretty fuzzy. I mean, Lisp is already at least a 100 year language IMO so what could Arc do to make itself more so? What is it going to do that the other two popular Lisp-1s don't? The only differentiator I've seen so far is pg's confusion of terse for concise [1]. I think there is always more room for programming languages…
I like your "terse vs concise" argument. I always felt that PG's notion of succinct is analogous to "cryptic".
Short is not always good.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
My goal from the beginning was to continue where JMC left off: to continue building Lisp up from axioms till I have a more complete language. I've compromised a bit to make it something runnable, which I think you need in order to test out your ideas on programs of substantial length. But "practical programming" is not in itself the main goal. Paradoxical as it sounds, that may be the way to end up with the best lang…
Wasn't McCarthy working on a model that's more elegant than Turing machines? As far as axioms go, you can't get simpler than the Turing machine: it doesn't even have a notion of a variable, let alone types or strings. I don't know about the history of Lisp other from what I've read from you, but it seems what McCarthy was working on was a more elegant model, rather than an "axiomatically pure" model. Arc on the other…
Lambda calculus is actually simpler than Turing machines. There are only two primitives: function definition and application. You can use that to express any computable function, including booleans, conditionals, integers, arithmetic, strings, etc.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
My goal from the beginning was to continue where JMC left off: to continue building Lisp up from axioms till I have a more complete language. I've compromised a bit to make it something runnable, which I think you need in order to test out your ideas on programs of substantial length. But "practical programming" is not in itself the main goal. Paradoxical as it sounds, that may be the way to end up with the best lang…
Wasn't McCarthy working on a model that's more elegant than Turing machines? As far as axioms go, you can't get simpler than the Turing machine: it doesn't even have a notion of a variable, let alone types or strings. I don't know about the history of Lisp other from what I've read from you, but it seems what McCarthy was working on was a more elegant model, rather than an "axiomatically pure" model. Arc on the other…
I believe his goal was a formal model of computation that was also good for expressing algorithms. Plus eval probably seemed like a neat trick. We take it for granted, but imagine how pleasing that must have been to think of.
I'm not trying to compete with Ruby and Python. If I were I'd be recruiting armies of people to write libraries.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What advantages does Arc have over Clojure? It has nothing to do with Oracle's Java and vice versa. If that doesn't seem like much of an advantage to you, you're probably right, and it isn't, and godspeed. There is no pressing need to learn Arc today. (I haven't yet, myself, though not for lack of ambition.) Arc will still be there, still unconnected to anything Java, in five years; we'll see how it feels then.
Almost unrelatedly, any idea if there's a strong push for a more current, well-maintained .NET/mono version of Clojure, now that the JVM is going down in flames?
clojure is trying to bootstrap it self to be able to be on many platforms but for that we need
1. the proper primitives to make it possible (done in 1.2)
2. match java speed (working on it primitive types ...)
3. rewrite the data structures and compiler in clojure
Thats the plan to let clojure fly.
As for CLR the implementation is pretty good and there is a binary but there wont be a strong push.
Btw. i do not belive that the jvm is going down in flames. Thats typical trollhyping.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#37Personally I have a hard time seeing what the goal for Arc would be. "100 year language" seems pretty fuzzy. I mean, Lisp is already at least a 100 year language IMO so what could Arc do to make itself more so? What is it going to do that the other two popular Lisp-1s don't? The only differentiator I've seen so far is pg's confusion of terse for concise [1]. I think there is always more room for programming languages…
I like your "terse vs concise" argument. I always felt that PG's notion of succinct is analogous to "cryptic". Short is not always good.
It probably has a positive correlation, but isn't an end in itself.
"Short" languages typically have a programming model which makes common coding tasks implicit: ML (and other languages with type inference) make most type annotations implicit, pattern-matching languages (Erlang, Prolog, ML, Haskell, awk) make a lot of de-structuring and switching code implicit, APL dialects (APL, J, K/Q, etc.) make looping implicit, concatenative languages (i.e. Forth, Joy, Factor) and tacit / "points-free" languages (Haskell and J, again) make variables and dataflow implicit, constraint and/or logic languages (Prolog, Mercury, Oz) make search implicit, etc.
It's often a net win, but some problems inevitably clash with their model - it seems important to have some kind of escape built into the language.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
As much as I like pg's essays generally I don't particularly like his essays on hardcore programming topics like language design. Maybe it is because I am inexperienced in most of the topics he discusses in his essays but I am quite experienced in programming. Some reactions to the essay: "I predict a similar fate for Java" It is ridiculous that pg once said he does not know Java at all. Yet he expresses his opinions…
"What pg speaks about is some kind of utopia."
More of a limit. By historical standards you're approaching it fairly rapidly. A couple decades ago you might have been using Cobol.
Someone has to work on the stuff at the limit, in order to generate the ideas that the "real world" stuff copies.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
As much as I like pg's essays generally I don't particularly like his essays on hardcore programming topics like language design. Maybe it is because I am inexperienced in most of the topics he discusses in his essays but I am quite experienced in programming. Some reactions to the essay: "I predict a similar fate for Java" It is ridiculous that pg once said he does not know Java at all. Yet he expresses his opinions…
But, Java does suck!
I prefer a utopia where we don't need to write horrible complicated enterprise applications. They're not fun anyway.
The enterprises don't have a clue what they need anyway, I bet python can replace Java in all enterprise applications and do a better job, but the managers are too thick headed to accept anything unless it's mainstream and backed by a mega corporation.
Re: What's happening with Arc?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I like pg's essays generally I don't particularly like his essays on hardcore programming topics like language design. Maybe it is because I am inexperienced in most of the topics he discusses in his essays but I am quite experienced in programming. Some reactions to the essay: "I predict a similar fate for Java" It is ridiculous that pg once said he does not know Java at all. Yet he expresses his opinions…
But, Java does suck! I prefer a utopia where we don't need to write horrible complicated enterprise applications. They're not fun anyway. The enterprises don't have a clue what they need anyway, I bet python can replace Java in all enterprise applications and do a better job, but the managers are too thick headed to accept anything unless it's mainstream and backed by a mega corporation.
Python is a better language than Java overall, but Java has some advantages over Python: because of static typing it is faster and has a very good IDE support. (autocomplete, code navigation, refactoring, etc...) In my eyes the most superior languages have static typing with a clever type inference, so that the code remains concise despite static typing. I like Scala because it really has the best of all worlds. (Although really mastering it is a bit more work than mastering Java or Python.)