A language that can express algorithms in few lines that are very cryptic (read: hard to read) is not very useful.

Part of Arc's design philosophy is to never inconvenience advanced users in order to serve novice ones. Long, descriptive names help people unfamiliar with a language's operators better understand what they do, but the length can become a burden once they do know.

For example, when I first started learning Arc, it would have saved me some headache if afn had been named anaphoric-function. Now I would find that a real nuisance. I love being able to invoke such a powerful abstraction with just three keystrokes.

Here's an interesting exercise. This is the given solution to the Arc Challenge [1]:

  (defop said req
    (aform [w/link (pr "you said: " (arg _ "foo"))
             (pr "click here")]
      (input "foo")
      (submit)))

What would you prefer that it looked like? If you replaced all the abbreviated names with long descriptive ones, you'd have something like:

  (define-operator said request
    (html-anaphoric-form
      [html-with-link 
        (print "you said: " (argument _ "foo"))
        (print "click here")]
      (html-input "foo")
      (html-submit)))

---

[1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=722