So the big news today, at least for some small community of the initiated, is the release of a first version of Arc, Paul Graham’s LISP dialect that many people waited for. I’ve seen some mixed reactions:
[R]ight now it’s not really convincing as an alternative to CL or Scheme itself. Don’t construe this as a harsh criticism towards Arc, it is not. We are talking about a language that it’s in its infancy and that as I said, I plan to experiment with myself. I hope to see it grow rapidly and I congratulate Graham and his team for finally making it available. That said, right now I think it’s a weak release and therefore, in my opinion, the disappointment of many is justified. In any case, good luck Paul, we’ll watch this one closely.
The most disturbing critique — regarding Graham’s decision to not implement Unicode — comes from Aristotle Pagaltzis:
Getting character strings right, however, is something that you really do need to get right at the core language level. You cannot leave it for libraries to fix.
After a quick glance at the tutorial, the most intriguing bit seems to be the support for macros, which work (almost) like function definitions. Interesting, but nothing that gets me overly excited.
Sean McGrath thinks one needs to keep an eye on it. I agree.
The Arc macro system looks to be the same as the simplest macros in Common Lisp and in several Scheme implementations. As Graham wrote: good choice, to avoid the “hygenic”, er, crap.