
"And, it turns out, Paul Graham's a phony" - nreece
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20080128/048241.html
======
mechanical_fish
This sort of thing certainly helps to explain why Lisp is threatened with
extinction in the wild.

Should I become a new member of the Lisp community, where my every
contribution will be greeted with insults, derision, and snobbery? Or should I
just learn PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, or C? Suddenly, the decision that
most people make seems pretty darned rational.

One of the biggest advantages that Arc has over the myriad other Lisps is that
PG actually _wants_ new users.

~~~
projectileboy
I agree. I think the way forward is to just completely nuke the Lisp community
from orbit and start from scratch. There are a few kind folks on
comp.lang.lisp, but for me, I'm going to pretend that the world began last
week, and the only Lisp community that exists is on the arclanguage.org forum.

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pistoriusp
I read a book called "The 10 differences between the middle class and
millionaires," I think the first difference the author makes is that the
middle class talks about people and millionaires talk about ideas.

This has stuck with me and I generally try to avoid conversations that are
about people...

~~~
wallflower
I'm not sure what this has to do about the article but this is a comment that
just stood up and yelled to get my attention. From the millionaires I've met,
I seem to find that they tell a story that relates to the point they are
making. And they're not afraid to admit their weaknesses. And they talk about
ideas.

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pg
I just posted a reply to this sort of thing:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html>

I'm interested to see how Mr. Bone will do with whatever presumably much
superior language he currently prefers...

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bfioca
This is where a down arrow on stories might come in handy...

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Hexstream
May I ask what approximate % of The Vision has been completed?

If version 0 is not even 7.5% (fake accuracy here) of what Arc will be at its
mature stage, I'm not too worried.

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apgwoz
Digging through a few of the other threads there, a complaint about using = as
a generalized set was among the best example of complaints I've seen about arc
yet. Using = promotes proggramming in a non functional style (apparently), but
lisp is multiparadigm anyway. I have yet to read what the paradigm of arc is
supposed to be, but my assumptions are, whatever one you want.

~~~
pg
Every popular Lisp dialect has assignment. They can't have been complaining
about that. The gripe must have been with my choice of = as the name for
assignment.

~~~
apgwoz
It was. You probably care not, but:

[http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20080128/0482...](http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20080128/048253.html)

------
vegashacker
At the risk of meriting this story with a response, from what I've read, I was
under the impression that Arc was _not_ implemented as an interpreter, but
rather, using macros. This would mean Arc has more of a compiler
implementation (Arc => PLT) than an interpreter. Am I wrong about this?

(It's on my list to read the source code, but haven't yet.)

------
jfoutz
Wow, Jeff Bone being critical. THE Jeff Bone!

Shocking.

~~~
bootload
_"... THE Jeff Bone! ..."_

Not this one [0], this one [1]. One is a cartoonist. The other a comic tragic.

[0] <http://www.boneville.com/>

[1] <http://www.google.com/search?q=jbone+at+place.org>

~~~
bayareaguy
Comrade, Jeff _Smith_ is the author of Bone.

~~~
bootload
_"... Comrade, Jeff Smith is the author of Bone ..."_

Opps. 2 pickups in 24.

------
curi
_Some of the design choices [pg's] made are just bad, too._

Well, name one, and give a reason.

~~~
bayareaguy
Not that I agree, but here's one from the thread:

[http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20080128/0482...](http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20080128/048257.html)

