[FoRK] Re: Arc's out, Nu vs. newLISP, and a retort to Paul Graham's elitism

On Jan 30, 2008, at 8:23 AM, Justin Mason wrote: > > Jeff Bone writes: >> Some of the design >> choices he's made are just bad, too. > > As Artistotle Pagaltzis notes at http://plasmasturm.org/log/491/ , > that includes not bothering with any Unicode support. (!) Right, though that wasn't even what I was thinking of. This thing is ALL about making almost completely superficial tweaks to the regular Lisp lexicon of terms and forms. There's no substance here. Continuations and call/cc? Who knows, maybe. Objects? Eh, kind of, but we're not really taking a stand. Standard library? Fuggedaboutit. Support for new stuff like lots of new literal syntax for useful datatypes (time / date, URI, pathnames, etc.)? Unification of docs, objects, and tables ala C-Omega / LINQ? Embedding of markup as first-class literal syntax? New concurrency prims? Exposed internals / reflective stack? Compilation? FFI? Baked-in serialization of all types, including closures and continuations? Join calculus? Selective lazy evaluation? Progressive typing? Tail call optimization required? Bueller? Bueller? Smoke another one. There's NOTHING NEW HERE. Just a bunch of trivial abbreviations and minor syntactic sugar. There's NO innovation! FWIW, Rebol circa 8 years ago was a far more impressive "new Lisp" than Arc! If you're looking for new ideas in programming languages that are going to allow you to solve lots of problems a lot more easily, don't bother looking here. OTOH, if you're a die-hard Lisper who just loves to learn trivial new dialects of Lisp for fun, this is your ticket to ride. Forget innovation, Arc's not even an acceptable modern Lisp! Hello, MODULE SYSTEM?!?! You're telling me there's NO MODULE SYSTEM?!?! AGAIN?!?! Did we learn nothing at all through 6 rounds of RxRS over ~20-odd years with Scheme? Grrr.... Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but when you blast the world for years with manifestos about how inadequate all programming languages are besides Lisp, and yet how Lisp isn't even really suitable yet, but wait --- you're going to save the day, everybody just hold your breath until your shiny new version comes and solves all the world's programming problems... when you do that, then you deliver this, you deserve whatever abuse anybody wants to send your way. jb