Arc, if you don't know, is Paul Graham's "100 year language", or, more prosaically, new version of Lisp. It was heavily trailed on reddit (back when reddit was interesting), and an early version was released in January last year.
But nothing much seems to have happened since then - the forum is virtually dead, and there's nothing new on Paul Graham's own site. Does anybody know what's going on?
To me that looked like a lot of hot air. I have also watching whats going on for a while, but am frustrated now. The stuff that came out of it is far from the praises in his essays. But maybe he is simple too busy...
No one knows much. Last time Paul Graham posted to the Arc forum was here where he indicated that he doesn't care if he produces anything that people "think they want right now" and he doesn't have time to work on Arc. That was a few months ago and it may have been the straw that broke the Arc community's back. Arc is vaporware or abandonware in my opinion.
For an alternative, Clojure is a good, fresh, actively-developed Lisp that exists and works right now.
Arc is not intended to be the next big thing. It is more intended to be the next big thing after the next big thing after the next big thing after the next big thing after the next big thing. In fact, the programmers for whom Arc is intended, haven't even been born yet ... heck, their parents haven't even been born yet!
So, cut the guy some slack! Designing a programming language is hard. Designing a programming language that stands the test of time is even harder.
I mean, sure, COBOL is still alive and kicking, but that's not the kind of immortality Paul Graham is looking for. He doesn't want programmers in 2109 writing Arc because they have to maintain some horrible legacy codebase, he wants them writing Arc because it's still the best, most beautiful, most enjoyable, most expressive, most powerful language.
If you are looking for a Lisp for 2009 (or even 2019), instead of 2109, then I second Brian C.'s suggestion: take a look at Clojure.
I don't think Paul Graham's goal in designing his new language involves any sort of effort to be "first to market" or caring about backwards compatibility, maintaining a complex implementation, building a community, libraries, testing, etc... It sounds like it's a much longer term process. (And that's fine!)
In response to this blog post that mentions Arc, Paul Graham (pg) made the following comment on Hacker News (HN) indicating that Arc has not been abandoned by any means:
"Eventually, Mr. Graham himself seemed to spurn the language"
Imagine how ridiculous this was to read while taking a break from working on HN, surrounded by windows full of Arc source I was in the middle of editing.
A lot of people seem to feel that a language isn't real unless the designer is talking to them every day. But that's not the only way languages happen. Nor possibly the best way. I feel like you get better ideas if you think in units of occasional essays rather than a stream of tweets. It seems likely the same will be true with language design.
Um, Paul Graham's better half Jessica has had a baby is what's happened to Arc...
Last update I'm aware of is here:
The baby's sleeping, and I'm hacking.
The next release will have more improvements to news.arc than the underlying language, because that's what I've been working on most lately. But I'm going to be focusing more on the language soon.
Arc is dying into obsolescence ... its star is slowly fading away ...
And picolisp is becoming more interesting. picolisp is the most "arc"-like lisp out there, and is 15-20 years ahead of arc.
Arc appears to be moving glacially if at all. Clozure (not to be confused with Clojure, which has already been mentioned) is arguably closest to Arc as an alternative.
5 hours ago Paul Graham said:
I'll probably release a new version later this year. Most of the changes will be in news.arc, which is now pretty solid. Maybe I'll actually make an effort to make it installable without having to understand the source.