Re: Paul Graham's Arc is released today... what is the long term impact?

not.danieli@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Oddly, the number one thing about Arc that you dislike about it seems
to be that it isn't innovated by your definition of innovative. Why
does it have to be innovative?

Because of http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

Common Lisp wasn't innovative. If I'm
not mistaken Common Lisp was just a mash-up of many other lisps. While
some things may have been added which weren't originally there,
nothing was a spectacular change which couldn't have been easily
implemented as a "plain thin library" on top of some other lisp.

Others have already responded to that. The most important aspect to me, though, is that Common Lisp's goals were much more humble than Paul Graham's goal for Arc: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node6.html#SECTION00510000000000000000

Honestly, Pascal, Arc's biggest draw isn't what's different from
scheme or common lisp, it's how it combines the best of both languages
(at least I think it does). I'm sure you'll disagree on some points,
like it's lisp-1-ness and various other choices it made, but the idea
was to combine the two languages. Like how Common Lisp was meant to
combine the lisps which were available when it was made. I know you
disagree with a lot about Arc, but to me it's Common Lisp 2, because
it was designed with the same idea in mind as CL was (despite what pg
may say).

It doesn't even remotely cover the whole feature set of either Scheme or Common Lisp.

Now, you never said you think CL is the hundred year language, so this
doesn't really prove anything; but what leads you to believe that the
next 100 year language must necessarily be innovative?

Because 100 years is a very long time. A lot of things may change until then, including completely unexpected changes. What will survive in the very long run are the concepts, not the concrete manifestations of the concepts. What matters are concepts like functional programming, not concrete functional programming languages; object-oriented programming, not concrete object-oriented programming languages; imperative programming, not concrete imperative programming languages; programmable programming languages, not concrete programmable programming languages.

None of the existing Lisp dialects will still be there in a 100 years from now. Common Lisp and Scheme won't be there. At least not in the same form as we know them today. (Maybe the unlikely thing happens that one of the names survives, but it's likely that it will stand for something quite different.) New programming paradigms will emerge, and some currently existing ones will die. Hopefully.

In terms of concepts, there is _nothing_ new in Arc at all. So far.

Yes, it would be nice if the concepts in Arc would still exist in hundred years from now. But they are exactly the same concepts like in dozens of other languages. So far.

Consider some of the most popular programming languages right now:
Java, C, C++. Were they innovative? No, not really.

I don't care about popularity.

BTW, I wouldn't have any problems with Arc if Paul Graham just said what
it is: A neat scripting language, without substantially new ideas, like
most other neat scripting languages. But he promises much more, and
doesn't seem to deliver...

Please ignore everything PG says about Arc. Arc is the programming
language; Arc is what we are discussing here, not our personal
feelings toward Mr. Graham, or what kind of ceremony it was released
with. If you have no problems with Arc, why complain about it so
avidly?

Because it may do more harm than good.


Pascal

--
1st European Lisp Symposium (ELS'08)
http://prog.vub.ac.be/~pcostanza/els08/

My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
.

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