

PG: Clarification about Character Sets - rms
http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=391

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coffeeaddicted
Maybe the reason why this was the number one criticism was that it was so
prominently mentioned in the introduction of Arc.

One complete paragraph on how hard it was to fix this in python and that it
seemed to take whole year. And another large paragraph basically telling that
it's trivial and could be done in a few days, but who cares anyway.

This is simply the sort of writing where pg _had_ to expect attacks.

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nreece
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know
About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) --
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

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utnick
I am not a scheme/lisp expert by any means.

But from following the discussion on reddit, it seems that the most biting
criticism of Arc are not related to unicode or w3c specs, but that Arc doesn't
have any enhancements over scheme besides shortening some keywords.

Can someone with more knowledge than me weigh in on what Arc gives us that
scheme doesn't?

~~~
rkts
An official implementation.

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mixmax
Release early and release often.

Anyhing that is released in a version 1.0 (which I think arc isn't even) will
have flaws and shortcomings. The value of the feedback by far exceeds the cost
of having users look at a product that isn't flawless.

This is especially true for something as complicated as a programming
language.

~~~
randallsquared
Yeah, Arc is _explicitly_ version zero.

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fleaflicker
The last paragraph is great advice for all software development, not just
languages.

When you're writing software for larger company it's difficult to justify
redesigning to create a simpler, more elegant codebase because it adds zero
value (from a customer's perspective).

When you're working on your own project, it's possible and also eventually
pays off, yielding more maintainable code.

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eusman
it's funny most people didn't seek perfomance charts than support of Unicode,
but this due to the general nature of the audience here in Hacker News, who
are mostly web application developers, therefore one of their priorities is
multi-language support, so no need to blame anyone.

One more reason Arc is not for everyone is due to its functional syntax. I
think the challenge would be how to make functional syntax accesible to the
masses. Arc seems to be one step forward, although functional programming will
never be for everyone.

~~~
hernan7
One thing I think Arc does (or intends to do) right is to be as cruft-free as
possible. _That_ is one thing you need to get functional programming to the
masses. If learning FP means also having to master dotted pairs, associative
tables, 13 different object comparison procedures, cadaddadr, the LOOP
syntax... then you can count "the masses" right out.

Add a good introductory book (the current tutorial looks good; I haven't
finished it yet) and you may be onto something.

