Arc Forum: Where are we going? | Hacker News Reader

Arc Forum: Where are we going?

arclanguage.org

18 pointsrms8 comments

Clojure seems to be the hot candidate in the "new lisp" space. I think that is partly that Rich Hickey seems a lot more committed to Clojure than Graham does to Arc. (Most of Graham's writing seems to be about ycombinator and startups.) The "100-year language" thing may also play into it; Clojure seems much more likely to be useful in the near term than Arc does, because it is interoperable with Java. Good or bad, there is a lot of Java out there.

Graham's a great essayist, but I don't think he can split his attention between yc and Arc and have both be successful.

Clojure does indeed seem like the hot candidate, but to repeat a point that pg has made several times: he's not interested in being 'hot'.

Yeah, but it got to the point where I no longer can tell what his goals are for Arc. For a while I thought he was working on the 'hundred year language' dream, but if that is still the goal I'll argue that at the moment Clojure is more of a step in the right direction than Arc.

Interesting; why do you see Clojure as more geared towards that goal than Arc? Although I haven't used Clojure, it seems like more of a compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM than a language designed to last into the next century.

I highly recommend at a minimum reading http://clojure.org/rationale for the rationale behind Clojure.

What about Clojure strikes you as being a 'compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM'?

> Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments in, and are comfortable with the performance, security and stability of, industry-standard platforms like the JVM.

This very much suggests that Clojure is trying to solve today's problems, not those 100 years in the future.

I think the Lisp + functional programming + concurrency primitives shows a lot more about what kinds of problems Clojure is trying to solve than the fact that it runs on the JVM.

This has been posted here before, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=343571

Reply on news.ycombinator.com