Arc is used in production software. Using some other language will be a better choice if it has some feature or library you need that Arc doesn't have. However, for the features that Arc does have, its stability and performance is fine.
If the reason to start arc
To clarify, I was speaking for myself. If you'd like to know why Arc was started, I recommend you read the essays: http://paulgraham.com/arc.html
I guess it's all about politics
No. If someone else wants to travel to the other side of the world and I want to visit my local coffee shop, it's not politics for them to work on buying plane tickets and for me to work on buying a bicycle.
"No. If someone else wants to travel to the other side of the world and I want to visit my local coffee shop, it's not politics for them to work on buying plane tickets and for me to work on buying a bicycle."
Different people have different goals, desires, and needs. Let's suppose that I was the one who wanted to travel to the other side of the world... it wouldn't make sense to say to me, "hey, plane tickets are expensive! use a bike instead!"
And vice versa... if I were the one who wanted to travel to a local coffee shop, it wouldn't make sense to say to me, "hey, bikes are slow! use a plane instead!"
Two different people have two different needs, and the way that they can best achieve their needs are different. Arc isn't designed to be a production language. You can use it for production, but that's not Arc's goal. There are already other languages out there that are suited for production.
It doesn't make sense to demand that everybody use a "production language" just as it doesn't make sense to demand that everybody use a language designed for exploratory programming.
Thus, it is legitimate to say, "I want to do production work and Arc doesn't seem suited to that task", in which case we can try to recommend other languages that are better suited to production work.
But it's pretty silly to say, "Arc doesn't do production work well... you guys should use Scheme/Common Lisp/Java/etc. instead!" because that's assuming that we want to do production work.
It's not a matter of politics that different people have different desires, and that different languages focus on different desires.
