"..the process of researching, evaluating and spending time trying to make an informed decision would not lead to being closed minded.."
'Close minded' implies intolerance. Did I really seem to suggest that? I meant to imply ignorance. All that needs is lack of exposure (or inefficient exposure), not any conscious unwillingness to learn.
"..picking a language with more road blocks and frustration points can do far more damage to a newbies enthusiasm/momentum than some initial research might otherwise cause."
Yeah that is true. Everybody's going to eventually hit frustration points, and some positive associations at the outset can help reinforce a trajectory of persistence. But there's a lot more to the frustrations of programming than language.
Perhaps it's worth providing a blacklist of languages to avoid. I'm curious what would go on your blacklist; no modern language seems particularly egregious to my mind.
I was writing 'closed minded' thinking only in terms of not choosing to learn rather than any intolerance or stubbornness. Poor choice of words on my part - sorry about that.
I don't have a blacklist, but as a newbie, having hit the wall so many times with Arc as my first language I can't help but think I should have done some rudimentary research before I sunk the time and effort in that i did.
I still think Arc is a great first language choice, but setting the expectations prior to the investment would have limited the frustration for me. Of course even for me this was back in the day when you could hope the Arc language community might get ahead of the curve while you were learning and produce enough libraries to fill in some of the missing features like practical and robust database access. These days that would be crazy thinking, IMHO.
Sometimes getting off the ground isn't enough. I think it's better to get off the ground and get some momentum going too. Clojure would have done that for me, but at the time I believe arc was more popular / mature than Clojure.
As a note I still think Arc first then Clojure is an awesome path. With arc you can get up and running fast with a really well written tutorial. And as a bonus, because there's only a simple[1] set of features making up the core you do not have to deal with the extra complexities (such as immutability) right at the beginning. This lessens the burden. But, at the same time, I'm going to suggest that newbies treat arc like a learning language rather than something they can develop real world, deep applications with (Of course this is a general statement that can not account for each persons specific needs).
[1] simple may require a more in depth conversation here. i.e In application it may mean it's is really easy, but not actually very simple...all this is assuming you've followed Rich Hickey's 'Simple made Easy' campaign.
"I'm going to suggest that newbies treat arc like a learning language rather than something they can develop real world, deep applications with (Of course this is a general statement that can not account for each persons specific needs)."
Well, that's not entirely true... If you're talking about Arc 3.1, then of course it has a huge lack of libraries.
But Arc/Nu has access to most of Racket's libraries: for instance, "re.arc" just uses Racket's regexp support to implement regexp matching.
As another example, in an internal application I wrote in Arc, I had to parse XML. I used Racket's built-in XML parser which also has an option to use "X-Expressions" which is basically XML represented as S-expressions:
I have to say, even though I don't like Racket the language... Racket the infrastructure and libraries is top-notch. I suppose the same has been said about Java.
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So, although I agree with you that Arc 3.1 is lacking, that's not necessarily true of forks like Anarki, ar, or Arc/Nu. And I think the only reason Arc 3.1 is lacking is because pg has been busy with non-Arc things.
That's one major benefit Clojure (and other languages) have over Arc: they're still being actively maintained.
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I still agree with you in principle, though, that a language like Clojure, Python, or Ruby would be easier to get up and running, due to their larger community and wider availability of libraries. In particular, even though I haven't used it, Clojure looks like a very nice language, from the small bits and pieces I've seen.
I would too, even though I've come to dislike mutability. Ruby has the community, the libraries, and the features. It's also a fairly consistent and clean language overall. I'd rank it at roughly the same level as Arc, maybe a tiny bit higher.
Ruby syntax is quite consistent and clean, and its support for closures very handy. I really like it.
Clojure has a strong philosophical bias for immutability and a functional approach, but has a slightly higher overhead with its combination of Lisp and support for Java. I think it has a bright future, despite pg's view that the jvm isn't what the 100 year language will be built on. :)
"..'closed minded' thinking only in terms of not choosing to learn rather than any intolerance.."
Sorry, that was all I meant as well. Intolerance in the sense of 'intolerant of the pains required to learn programming'. There's no negative connotation to that sense, I think.
At the risk of going around in circles, I was referring to all the subconscious reasons people fail to get going with programming, rather than any conscious intolerance.
I actually wasn't thinking of arc at all. You can probably find better first languages (though having the compiler open in a split window is a unique selling point). But it doesn't seem worth optimizing beyond a point. Just pick one and keep going. The test of a first language is not whether you hate it after a while, but whether you keep programming in some language.
I'm focusing on Clojure now though I will keep an eye on Arc developments. Arc is really nice to play with but I agree that Clojure has the traction, even by the yardstick pg mentioned about what it'll take for a language to dominate (community, number of books, power of the language itself, etc.). It also has the whole Java library to support it, even though it has led to some uncomfortable syntax in some cases.
Additionally, I find Rich Hickey has given deep thought to his philosophy re programming and its challenges, and has applied it quite consistently over the years. There is a clear pattern in his approach to the development of Clojure and more recently to that of Datomic, with much of it coming out of the ideas he talked about years ago on the concept of simplicity.
