"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. :)
