
Qi, arc competitor?  Qi is lisp for 21st century. - npk
http://www.lambdassociates.org/
======
amichail
From Qi's designer, Mark Tarver

"Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University"

<http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm>

~~~
whacked_new
A good read! Tarver writes extremely well. And while it echos the voices of
what sounds clearly like a cynic, it's pretty convincing and concerning. Sad
thing is those concerned few are usually those who don't play by the rules and
you end up with little might. But what the hell, someone's gotta fight.

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ecuzzillo
It sounds to be wasting a lot of time proving things about programming, when
the spirit of Lisp is usually much more test-driven and not proving things.
The stated goal is so that you can go about your normal business, but
PROVABLY! I'd say this is much more in the spirit of ML than the spirit of
Lisp.

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omouse
I don't like the case-sensitive symbols. Nor do I like the implicit quote on
symbols...it doesn't make much sense to me but that might because there aren't
many good code samples on the site.

Is it too much to ask for a nice looking website with lots of good code
samples? And a reference link for all the functions that work in the language
would be nice.

As much as some people dislike newLISP, it at least has a good clear/concise
website: <http://newlisp.org/> The purpose is clearly stated, and right away
you know on what it can run and where to look for comparisons to other Lisps.

Not much of a competitor to Arc in my opinion. But pg, please show us some
more Arc code :P

~~~
Goladus
I'm no lisper but it seems to me that the implicit quote and the resulting
need to use square brackets to delineate lists would make it more difficult to
write macros.

~~~
omouse
It depends on how he's defined the implicit quote syntax. You could make it so
it doesn't have any effect in a def-macro call or something but that increases
complexity just a tiny bit for a feature that doesn't do much for the
developer.

Off-topic-ish: The square brackets are kind of neat but not for that purpose.
If instead he allowed the interchange of square brackets and parenthesis, i.e.
(+ 2 [ _3 2]), that would be neat and useful...it would allow someone to
differentiate between nested lists slightly. And of course, it's easier to
click [ instead of Shift+[ to get ( :p

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ryantmulligan
Any competitor is a good thing. It will either cause Arc to move faster, or
just be better than it. The pattern matching simplifications seem quite slick.

~~~
npk
I agree, ML style pattern matching seems so elegant. My favorite pattern
matching system is actually Mathematica. I wish more programming languages had
'em :)

------
npk
This comment was started as a thread here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20012>

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busy_beaver
Tcl/Tk? For the 21st century?

Ummm.. okay.

~~~
davidw
Tcl and Tk are very nice systems, which were done in by bad marketing and
leadership.

See this article:

<http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html>

~~~
omouse
It also looks _ugly_ by default.

~~~
davidw
Yes, "bad marketing". It's been possible for years to significantly improve
the look and feel at the scripting level, but they never bothered. Also, the
fact that it took them so long to figure out that Gnome and KDE were where
Unix was headed and get with the times is not a good sign that they have the
marketing skills necessary to stay current.

------
palish
They go on about type checking. The point of dynamically typed languages is
that they're dynamically typed.

