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.
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.
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).
You either would program it (even by nature language) or the human race will cease to exists.
However, you seem overly optimistic about our future in 100 years. Assembly language is roughly 70 years old, Lisp is in its middle age already (56) so that means by 2040 we will have our first 100 years language and by 2060s (depending if Lisp or Fortran are still alive) we would have our first 100 years hight level programming languages.
Honestly I don't see any AI going even close to what you suggest by any of those milestones.
It did, but then look at the languages it borrowed from: Self and Scheme.
Yes it has warts borne of ridiculous deadlines, but it also has elegance learned from prior art. All things considered, JS is a good advert for standing on the shoulders of giants, imho.
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.)
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 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.
He should probably rephrase. Clojure has won as an acceptable Lisp in business. Lisp'ers should probably get behind it to help to grow it even more. Once it grows, other Lisps will have an easier time.
I can't help but imagine a party, not entirely unlike the opening scene of Animal House except that everyone is older. Our protagonist enters and a hipster host quickly leads him away from the action and into a side room saying "Rich, Paul is working on a new dialect of lisp, too."
I'm not sure, I've used 'fn' in toy programming language concepts before I ever heard of arc or clojure. I mean, its not impossible and I certainly don't know about the others, but its also not impossible that they were independently named.
However, I do think its very likely that arc influenced Clojure, even if just a little.