On 2008-08-24, Daniel Pitts wrote:

i haven't actually used arc. My opinion of it is based on reading Paul
Graham's essays about his idea of some “100 year language” and
subsequent lisper's discussions on it this year here (most are highly
critical). Also, Wikipedia info gives some insight too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

Paul's essay:
“The Hundred-Year Language”
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

I consider one of the most wortheless essay. Worthless in the same
sense Larry Wall would have opinions on computer languages...

to fully detail will take several hours writing perhaps 2 thousands
words essay....

ok, perhaps a quick typing as summary of my impressions... but i know
all sort of flame will come.

Paul has some sort of infatuation with the concept of “hackers” (and
his languages is such that these “hacker” will like). I think this is
a fundamental problem in his vision.

If we look closely at the concept of “hacker”, from sociology's point
of view, there are all sort of problems rendering the term or notion
almost useless. In short, i don't think there is a meaningful class of
computer programer he calle “hackers” that one could say a computer
language is for them.

for example, hacker can be defined as knowledgeable programers, or
those exceptionally good at programing among professional programers,
or those who delights in technical details and their exploitation, or
those who are programers who tends to be extremely practical and
produce lots of useful codes, or those who's coding method heavily
relies on trial and error and less on formal methods or systems, or
perhas some element of all of the above. I don't mean to pick bones on
definitions, but i just don't see any sensible meaning in his frequent
use of the term in the context of designing a language.

put in another way... let's think about what langs are his “hackers”
like? would it be lisp?? perl?? or something such as Haskell? As you
know, these lang are quite different in their nature. However, it's
quite difficult to say which is the one hackers prefers. In some
sense, it's probably perl. But in another sense, it's lisp, since lisp
being unusual and has many qualities such as it's “symbols” and
“macros” concepts that allows it to be much more flexible at computing
tasks. But then, it could also be haskell. Certainly, lots of real
computer scientists with higher mathematical knowledge prefers it and
consider themselves real hackers in the classic sense of MIT's lambda
knight and ulimate lambda etc.

looking into detail on some of his idea about Arc's tech detail ... i
find them the most worthless.

so, yeah, in summary, i see arc as almost completely meritless, and as
a celebrity's intentional or unintentional effort to peddle himself.

Note, i find some of Paul's essays very insightful or i agree with,
such as one that talk about some psychology of nerds and highschool
bullies, and his opinion on OOP ...

----------------------------

here's some of my personal opinion on language design.

I think the criterions for “best” or “100-year” language is rather
very simple.

• it is easy to use. In the sense the masses can use it, not requiring
some advanced knowledge in math or computer science or practical
esoterica like unix bag.

• it is high level. This is related to easy to use. Exact, precise
definition of “High level” is hard to give, but typically it's those
so-called scripting langs, e.g. perl, python, php, tcl, javascript.
Typical features are typeless or dynamic typing, support many
constructs that do a lot things such as list processing, regex, etc.

• it has huge number of libraries. This can be part of the lang as
considered in java “API” or perl's regex or mathematica's math
functions, or can be bundled as many perl and python's libs, or as
external archive such as perl's cpan. The bottom line is, there are
large number of libraries that can be used right away, without having
to search for it, check reliability, etc.

the above are really down-to-earth, basic ideas, almost applicable to
anything else.

the tech geekers will you believe other things like garbage
collection, model of variable, paradigms like functional vs oop,
number systems, eval model like lazy or not lazy, closure or no, tail
recursion or no, has curry or no curry, does it have linder mayer
system or kzmolif type sytem, polymorphism yes?, and other moronic
things.

If you look at what lang becomes popular in the past 2 decades (thru
various website), basically those bubble up to top, are those with
good quality in hte above criterions. (e.g. perl, php, javascript,
visual basic.) C and Java are still at top, of course, because there
are other factors such as massive marketing done by Java, and C being
old and has been the standard low level system lang for decades.

(excuse me for typos and other errors... took me already a hour to
type and lots other newsgroup responses... will perhaps edit and put
on my website in the future...)

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄