
Ask PG: How is Arc coming along? - shawndumas
I noticed that 500 days ago you said that you&#x27;d be working on Arc again [1]. How&#x27;s it going?<p>-----<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7493993
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ColinWright
Clickable:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493993)

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1arity
Perhaps it is already complete.

Inspiration:

A manager went to the Master Programmer and showed him the requirements
document for a new application. The manager asked the Master: "How long will
it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the Master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if
I assign ten programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he
said.

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zatkin
He handed over the Hacker News leadership to a team of people a while ago[1],
so that might be a reason for why he hasn't been working on it.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-
hack...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news)

~~~
malisper
PG's comment was made on the post you are referencing.

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nabla9
Without deadline there will never be need to compromise. You can keep thinking
about it year after year and seek perfection that is The Hundred-Year
Language.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html)

~~~
mlitchard
Plans without deadlines are just dreams.

~~~
runjake

      > Plans without *action* are just dreams.
    

There. I fixed that for you.

~~~
coldtea
Not really. If the action drags forever, they remain just dreams (like some
great unfinished novel a guy writes for 50 years and gets to 60.000 pages).

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dragonshed
Some context (say, for example, a brief description of Arc) might be helpful.

~~~
ma2rten
LISP dialect invented by Paul Graham. This site is written in Arc. Afaik that
is the only mayor application so far.

[http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)

~~~
ForHackernews
> This site is written in Arc.

Is that why nobody can ever add any useful new features to it?

~~~
davelnewton
BURN

~~~
crazypyro
Meh, even if it was true, I consider that in itself a feature.

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maehwasu
Clojure won.

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vosper
You're getting downvoted, but I think there might be some truth to this.

~~~
drcode
As likely one of the few people outside of pg to use arc in production, I
agree Clojure won- It has about 80% of the features that arc pioneered, and
many additional features that leave arc in the dust. (Most of the remaining
"good ideas" in arc are syntactic sugar which are just too controversial to
see mainstream adoption.)

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wcummings
What features did arc "pioneer"?

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drcode
Shoot, it's been too long for me to sort out the various features now, but you
can read about the cooler parts of arc here:
[http://old.ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt](http://old.ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt)
which won't look very exciting to any Clojure programmer nowadays.

Probably its most useful innovation, even if it sounds mundane now (and I'm
not 100% sure it was first on this- feel free to correct me) is that it was
the first Lisp to realize that sequences and key-value associations are both
equally important and should both have first-class status in the core language
(with proper literal and shortcut accessor support) ... so like clojure, arc
is more of a MLISP (Map and LISt Processor)

However, the posted link doesn't have examples of the crazy syntactic sugar
stuff pg did that I think was added in a later revision.

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dothis
PHP won.

~~~
tylermauthe
lol.

