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.
