The Seven Deadly Sins of Arc | Hacker News Reader

The Seven Deadly Sins of Arc

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10 pointsnreece3 comments

This is pretty funny. A mixture of cargo-cultism ("Arc must not be real software because real software must be available at a public version control system and have automated tests" -- I guess nobody ever told Linus Torvalds, who claims to have spent years managing Linux development via emailed patches), Java envy ("Arc is not a real language because it has no built-in OOP system"), intensely personal pet peeves ("Arc is failing because PG's version numbering system consists of a series of numbers that increase monotonically, but not in the way I expect") and just plain missing the point:

Arc is not a mature language, nobody is asking you to use it, and it cannot be behind schedule because there is no stated plan or schedule for its inevitable World Domination. It is -- and I say this as one who has the utmost respect for great and serious toys -- still a toy. It is young, and it is enjoying its youth. So, when you play with it, try to at least act like you're having fun!

If and when the language takes off, there will be plenty of opportunity for "polishing", feature freezes, official releases, bug databases, security teams, FAQs, books, patents, trademarks, O'Reilly Arc conferences, Enterprise Arc conferences, legacy users, FUD, poorly constructed benchmarks, schisms, forks, flames, backstabbing, bitter debates about backwards compatibility... and so on, and so forth. At which point you will be pining for the glorious days when Arc was young and fun and had yet to grow up into a Serious Language with real-world consequences.

I'd like to add a couple more points:

1. Arc isn't just immature. pg made it quite clear that it's not even finished!

2. pg has also explicitly said that he isn't interested in it becoming popular, which goes some way to explaining why it isn't.

3. pg announced some five years ago that Arc wouldn't be 'especially object-oriented' and gave his reasons why. Exactly why was this a surprise to anyone?

    1, 2 - Uh, it's a work in progress.  Please read!
    3 - He's writing it himself.  So?  Projects don't have 
        to *start* using version control.  Hopefully they 
        will grow to where they really need it.  
    4 - This is the only valid criticism
    5 - It's meant to be minimalist.  Please read!
    6 - Same sort of shallow objection as #3
    7 - Code is not meant to be English.  "no" is just as 
        good as "not"
    8 - It's a work in progress.  Please read!

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