I've been following Arc since the beginning, like many of you. I've seen it going from a growing community of ideas to a shrinking community too small to improve the language quickly. The problem, though, is not the size of the Arc community right now (this is still a young language after all) but the fact that Arc lost its momentum: instead of attracting new people, users now go away from here. How did we get to this situation? What has changed? On day 0 Arc was launched as a prototype for a programming language. Some ranted about the deficiencies of the implementation (slow, no Unicode, useless error messages, no debugging facilities, etc.), but they were acceptable because it was a prototype. The goal of a prototype is to give the users a feeling of the language, so that they can contribute by saying what's wrong, what's good and what's missing. The author(s) should then discuss with the community to decide future directions for the development. This is what happened in the early days of Arc. This period didn't last very long, though. After the release of Arc2, pg almost abandoned the forum, and feeling the absence of the "boss" many left the building. Some left permanently, others lurk the forum just to see if it will come back to life. What the remaining community had was a prototype not suitable for real world development and not suitable for its role of prototype because the author wasn't there to listen to his users. This lead to a plethora of alternative implementations (anarki, rainbow, arc2c, snap, nyac, primitivearc, arc-f, ...), all trying to overcome the limits of the original, unmaintained version. The lack of a central authority lead to a dispersion of the few resources (in terms of people and time) available. New ideas died because the language (together with its main site) was held by an absent leader. To give one example, not too much time ago, there was the idea of a central repository of Arc libraries. The right place would have been under http://arclanguage.org/libs. This is still an invalid link. Every effort is useless if it will never be part of the official Arc instead of laying around in some github repository. There are only three possibilities for Arc right now: pg comes back (Hahaha!), someone takes the lead and makes a real fork of Arc, not just of the implementation, but also of the community and of the main site (no more arclanguage.org). The last possibility is to let Arc die. I'd appreciate the opinion of who is still here (even lurkers) on this post. What do you think about the history of Arc so far? What do you see in its future?