
Try Arc - evanrmurphy
http://tryarc.org/
======
garply
Thanks for posting this! Arc is really a great language - I use it every day
to power my Chinese e-commerce site (there were a bunch of totally bogus
complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support). Libraries are no
longer really a big problem: with aw's additions in Anarki, it's really easy
to call Perl and Python libraries, in addition to all of those from Racket.
And Anarki has a healthily growing set of indigenous libraries as well.

The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think
we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).

~~~
statictype
_there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack
of utf8 support_

Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham
explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the
priority list.

~~~
garply
Nope, they were bogus then too. I was hacking a Chinese website at the time.
Basically what happened is PG didn't use utf8 and didn't check to see if it
worked, but it did anyway. From the very beginning,

    
    
      (def 什么 () 1) 
      (什么) => 1
    

worked. Python, for example, can't even do that. As is often the case, the
people complaining didn't even bother to try it out to see what they were
actually complaining about.

There were a few tiny places that needed improving (I know, because I wrote
most of the utf8 improvements in Anarki), and they almost all revolved around
parsing / producing web-related utf8 stuff.

~~~
callahad
As of Python 3, that finally works :)

    
    
      Python 3.1.1 (r311:74543, Aug 24 2009, 18:44:04) 
      [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
      Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
      >>> def 什么():
      ...     return 1
      ... 
      >>> 什么()
      1

~~~
jacobolus
It didn’t work before partly by design. There was a long discussion about this
on the Python development lists a couple years ago.

------
evanrmurphy
I apologize for the downtime to anyone who has had problems accessing the
site. Temporary outages have come along with my modest traffic spike. I hope
you'll try back in a few minutes.

------
nickik
Arc seams to be just like Scheme. I can't see anything that makes it mutch
better. What is better in Arc then in Scheme?

What is the concurency story (does it have one)? Does arc have full tail call
optimisation?

~~~
evanrmurphy
_Does arc have full tail call optimisation?_

Yes. Arc's reference implementation inherits TCO from Racket.

------
alexyoung
Maybe you could make the keyboard shortcut handling stop detecting presses
when meta-keys are held down?

For example, if I type cmd-w (on a Mac) it types 'w' instead of closing the
tab as I would expect.

I've written a lot of keyboard shortcut junk for web apps so I've had to do
this before as well. :)

I was actually using Try Arc the other day to see how it compares to other
lisps that I'm familiar with. I like it!

------
crazydiamond
Came across arc some months back. Could you give a link to Why Arc ?

~~~
mahmud
I evaluated it a few weeks back while porting a Common Lisp system to Android,
and if you ask me, Arc is better suited as a resident language for a handheld
device than most other languages.

Paul's insistence on brief symbol names, and heavily simplified Lisp syntax
didn't make a lot of sense 8 years ago. But today, it's just what the doctor
ordered for mobile.

Should be a good language to script Android.

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anonymousDan
It's a pity that some things in the arc tutorial linked to at the top of the
page won't work - e.g. (defop hello req (pr "hello world")

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chollida1
I get the following error:

Unknown or expired link.

Does this mean the site is down?

~~~
evanrmurphy
If you got that error at the REPL after being on the site for a few minutes,
your sandbox probably got garbage collected due to high traffic. Please see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814494>

If you got it when you first arrived or in some other context, you're bug
reporting. Tell me more!

In either case, if you (wait a few minutes and) reload the page, it will
probably work. Thanks for your patience.

------
bhiggins
arc doesn't even pass its own challenge. "link unknown or expired"... great.

~~~
evanrmurphy
Providing independent sandboxed evaluation for every visitor to the site costs
a lot of memory. On my Linode 512, it only takes about 90 users before all the
memory is consumed and I have to start garbage collecting. If you saw that
message when you tried to evaluate something, you probably got GC'd.

I'd like to find a more graceful way of handling this. Any suggestions?

~~~
IdeaHamster
JS Arc interpreter? Hey, if they can do it for Haskell…

<http://github.com/johang88/haskellinjavascript>

;)

~~~
widgetycrank
Nostrademons wrote one, but it's pretty old, and I think the site is down.

<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1629>

~~~
evanrmurphy
It's still up at <http://jonathan.tang.name/files/arclite/index.html>

