Nicely put, akkartik. I'm sure your patience will be rewarded. More than Y Combinator, and perhaps as much as his really thought provoking essays, Arc represents pg's strongest shot at leaving behind a lasting legacy. I seriously doubt pg can leave Arc hanging for much longer. :)
In it Steve starts off by emphasizing the importance of learning regex to handle text processing in support of the assertion that Lisp isn't particularly good at it (text manipulation), while at the same time noting that Lispers look askance at regex itself.
He goes on to look at the issue from these two vantage points and states:
"How did I get so far off the original track of text processing? Well, that's the punch line of this shaggy-dog story: it's all text processing! Log files, configuration files, XML data, query strings, mini-languages, programming languages, transformers, web pages, word documents, everything... the vast majority of your programming work involves text processing somehow.
What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"
Wow. I already like Lisp, but that really had my attention.
Nice article. I agree that if a variant of Lisp is to step up to the plate along the lines mentioned in the article, Clojure can't be it. It's heavy with Java, and the setup isn't straight forward. This review of Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski suggests that older variants of Lisp like Common Lisp might do a better job, if not for systems scripting at least for providing a solid introduction to programming: http://books.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1238213/Land-of-Lis...
Thanks for the feedback. After having announced social integration in search, Google seems to have gone a little cagey on it. I'm not sure if it's because of the mixed reaction to it.
When they first launched it, the tabs to use or not use social search results were right there on the top right section of the search page. They've since been moving it around and it shows only if you click "More search tools" on the bottom left, where one option is "All search results" and another is "Social". And it isn't immediately obvious how much weightage the first gives to social results, if any at all.
Anyway, "All search results" is what I used and it does not appear to display what I get if I pick just the "Social" option, so it should be a decent indication of what the average Google search will show. Haven't used DuckDuckGo yet, will mosey over.
@oggy: I'm fairly new here myself, and based on what I've seen since joining, the most recently active branch has been Lite-Nu/Arc-Nu. Anarki (the nex3 branch) hasn't been as active lately. Checkout https://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki/ for more info on them.
The extent to which these extend Arc varies, so you should browse through their respective source codes as that will give you the clearest view on this front. You may find some of the extensions particularly useful, or not depending on your needs.
The authors of these branches would be in the best position to advise how suitable they are for production sites. HTH.
The site at http://julialang.github.com/ 301-redirects to http://julialang.org/. I did mention julialang.github.com above, but I was reluctant to linkify it since it probably wasn't going to help on its own. :-p
Come to think of it, adding a hosts file entry for julialang.github.com probably won't help. Adding one for julialang.org might work though. (If I keep changing my mind, I'll be right sooner or later!)
