

Compilation of suggestions submitted for Arc - mqt
http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt

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icey
It'd be really great if PG would consider doing an alpha release of Arc
sometime. To me, there appears to be a mini-Lisp revolution going on right
now, largely thanks to PG & reddit. It'd be a shame to let that energy
dissipate as people grow tired of waiting for it to come out.

I know the excitement that I have for Arc isn't as much the "100 year
language" issue as much as the need to have strong leadership for a Lisp. I
think that this is evident by the difficulties the various CLs have when
introducing new functionality to the language vs. a package, or the whole R6RS
fiasco that's been driving the Schemers mad.

~~~
michaelneale
I would second that. At the risk of hyperbole, the "mini-lisp revolution"
could be one of the more important things to happen to the state of the art.
Lisps just have so much going for them, but common lisp can not be the answer.
No idea about arc, but at least there is some potential for leadership to be
shown. People need to just start using stuff for "hobby" projects. Its
possible that lisp could become very popular, due to "language oriented
programming" - which is just a silly name to attract people (notice how "DSLs"
are now so popular, well lisp is nothing if not a platform for creating a DSL
which solves your problem for you). heh, its not anything knew, I think words
to that effect are mentioned in the SICP notes.

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abstractbill
I had an interesting chat with Emmett last week here at justin.tv. I was
whining about having to use Python instead of some kind of Lisp, and he
pointed out that the language choices at jtv have been made because of some
very important libraries, much more than language features.

If Arc wants to succeed it will need to come out-of-the-box with some great
libraries, and it will need to address the issue of how new libraries get
"blessed" and made available. Just my humble opinion of course...

~~~
icey
I agree ten-thousand percent about libraries, which is part of why I think
it'd be just peachy to have an Arc alpha. I think it's ridiculous to expect PG
& co. to be able to create a ton of libraries (or any) because they're doing
so much work on the language.

At least with an alpha, all of us excited kiddies can start poking around and
filling in holes.

Otherwise, we may all have to resign ourselves to the possibility that Perl 6
may actually release first ;)

~~~
olavk
Cant they just write a macro that automatically turns any scheme or lisp
library into an Arc library?

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henning
I'll add one more suggestion to the pile: shipping is a feature.

