Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið.

If the first Arc apps had not been full-featured Web apps, but had instead looked like examples from SICP, everyone would be complaining that the language was only good for computing Fibonacci sequences and writing interpreters for itself.

OTOH, you can't expect a new language to immediately offer the library resources of, say, Perl.

So the plan for Arc's early days seems to be similar to what the Pragmatic Programmer guys called the "tracer bullet" approach:

Tracer code is not disposable: you write it for keeps. It contains all the error checking, structuring, documentation, and self-checking that any piece of production code has. It simply is not fully functional. However, once you have achieved an end-to-end connection among the components of your system, you can check how close to the target you are, adjusting if necessary. Once you're on target, adding functionality is easy.

On day zero, Arc let you construct and deploy every aspect of a useful software system (a web app)... but it took a very narrow and direct path to that goal: emphasis on tables, no Unicode support, borrowing some functionality from an existing Scheme environment, etc., etc. That is what PG was trying to convey in his announcement: the strategic plan for Arc's early days is to work on designing a complete skeleton, but not add a lot of flesh.