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Arc

PaulGraham
RobertMorris

LanguageDesign

SuccinctnessIsPower

Lisp A dialect of Lisp developed (endlessly) by PaulGraham and RobertMorris.

• http://arclanguage.org/

Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them. [1]

• MzScheme

Lisp to pick up chicks! [2]

Released!

• http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/01/arc_released_2.html
  • Even in this unfinished state, I'd rather use Arc than Scheme or Common Lisp for writing most programs. And I am a fairly representative Lisp hacker, with years of experience using both. So while Arc is not the perfect Lisp, it seems to be better for at least some kinds of programming than either of the leading alternatives.
• http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
• http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2008/01/arc-pulls-no-punches.html
  
• http://brucio.blogspot.com/2008/01/arc-is-out.html

What you are left is is the bare essense of coding. Everything written is essential. Nothing is superfluous. There are truly no onions. The specification of Arc (which is the implementation of Arc) can be printed on just a few pages (full duplex); the whole thing is 4609 lines of code! [3]

Discussion

• Paul Graham’s kind of dirty

The Arc Challenge

• http://jamesshore.com/Blog/No-Take-the-Fit-Challenge-Instead.html
  • the Arc challenge: create a 3-pages web workflow
    • favors Arc's continuation-based web-API (which is patented)
  • TheFitChallenge: implement Fit (Framework for Integrated Test]]