The original authors haven't released updates in a while, but there's maybe a dozen of us here still using it, answering questions, riffing on programming language design ideas. Old-timers sometimes leave, but somehow there's newcomers to take their place.
I hope to, at some point. Unfortunately I'm nowhere in the range of riffin' on language design issues, and have a lot of catching up to do. Definitely very passionate about technology but I lost some years (20+ years to be precise) working in the civil service, including my free time in at least ten of those years which I thoroughly buried on the golf course. ;)
Yes, I got my handicap down to 10 or 11, which was nice, but what would be nicer would be getting those 20 years back and putting them to use leveling up on my coding skills!!! Still, those twenty years weren't entirely lost - I did manage to pick up a fair amount of experience writing hobby desktop applications and honed my SQL skills to a decent level. But I would like to have learned much more than that! I'm working on it now... finally.
I recall listening to an interview with Uncle Bob Martin in which he said he just figured he loves coding so much, he'll just continue doing it till they find him with his nose between the keyboards. I guess he meant it like how a cowboy means it when he says he wants to die with his boots on. I just want to echo those sentiments. And I get the sense from Arc Forum regulars that you all feel that way as well. That's why I like it here. :)
Yep :) No pressure, but metaphors like 'leveling up' and 'handicap' are just that -- metaphors. Just build something that scratches an itch, whether it's here or on the golf course. You might even be building something already. Just throw it over the wall. We're all nice here, so there's no downside compared to not showing, and unlimited potential upside in terms of getting feedback, more ideas, accelerating learning, and just getting an endorphin rush from having done something :) It doesn't have to be hacking on internals or anything. It doesn't have to be in arc or any lisp. Any little baby program will do.
One way to think about it: this is a small enough community that we can afford to get to know each other better. That's precious given the world we live in, the tendency to move fast, be busy, not know neighbors. And the best way to accelerate that process here is by sharing our code. (Or rants, but those can be harder to write and put out there, at least for me :)
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You know, I don't know if I'm passionate about technology. I just care about code, man. Code and the using of it to make sense of how the world works.
Thanks zck and akkartik. And I especially like this: One way to think about it: this is a small enough community that we can afford to get to know each other better. That's precious given the world we live in, the tendency to move fast, be busy, not know neighbors. And the best way to accelerate that process here is by sharing our code.
I'm a computer hobbyist and am (or was) an economist and business major by training. I spent most of my coding time in the past in proprietary languages and environments (dBase, Visual FoxPro, Paradox, Visual Basic, C# and MS SQL Server), with a little bit of MySQL and PHP thrown in the mix. That was from about 20 to about 8-10 years ago. It was only in the past 2-3 years or so that I opened my eyes to the open source world, stupid me. :)
I spent the early parts of this current stage learning Python, which I liked. And sometime earlier this year I moved on to Ruby, which I liked more. It was when I moved to Ruby that I realized I didn't really like Python's mandatory white space rules (among other things), and later, after I'd got into the innards of Arc, I got to see Steve Yegge's point that Ruby also has some of the whale gut strewn around as a result of borrowing too much from Perl.
I find Arc to be a really clean implementation of Lisp, producing clear, tight code - but two things draw me back. One is the smallness of the Arc ecosystem (primarily libraries, community developed toolkits, etc) and the other is the apparent neglect by its developers. So I made a second stab at Clojure (my first attempt cooled off after facing initial difficulties figuring out the Clojure tool chain, set up requirements etc. which seemed rather off-putting then).
The second attempt was good, and I've come to appreciate the simplicity and beauty of Clojure, and the relentless effort that Rich Hickey and others like Stuart Halloway are making in evolving it further, as well as getting their design philosophy and message out to the wider community. I've caught the Clojure bug and have settled on using Clojure and Clojurescript to scratch my itches. I'm also assessing Datomic to handle my data requirements. Let's see how it turns out - I'll post reports of my evolution in this direction as I move along.
I sincerely hope that Paul Graham and Robert Morris will give a little more attention to Arc's development in the near future. It's hard to see Arc become a 100 year language without some kind of nourishment from its authors. Of course, I will continue to play with Arc, will continue to enjoy the thoughts of fellow regulars on the Arc Forum, and will do whatever I can to help maintain http://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki.
