| I read the announcement, and I read the tutorial. The former didn't seem to tell me much about Arc except what's it's not good at, and while the tutorial is interesting, it doesn't really seem to say what sets Arc apart from other programming languages. I really like the ethos of making programs more succinct. The following excerpt resonates with me: "When there are patterns in source code, the response should not be to enshrine them in a list of "best practices," or to find an IDE that can generate them. Patterns in your code mean you're doing something wrong. You should write the macro that will generate them and call that instead." I can certainly see the possibilities, but what I don't understand, probably because I've never properly waded into Lisp or Scheme, is how Arc is strikingly different from other Lisps. Is the principle of Arc that Lisp can already do everything you would ever need on a big scale, so the only improvements left to make are on the small scale? To put it another way, can Arc do any better than a constant factor of code reduction from a well-written Lisp program? Has Lisp already succeeded in doing the "hard work" of boiling off all the boilerplate code duplication, and Arc just neatens and abbreviates the results? |
