Looks like Rich Hickey is on a tear - which is great news for all of us! BTW, http://blackstag.com/ is very nifty too - thank you for all the stuff on Clojure.
For those new to Datomic, probably the best way to get your mind around Datomic conceptually would be to watch these introductory videos[1] Rich and Stu put together when first introducing Datomic. It's pretty revolutionary, IMO.
"And while I agree that it could distract some people, I also think that 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."
That's a good point. Newbies can get turned off when things seem opaque.
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. :)
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.
"Just pick a language where you have a mentor to help you out when you get stuck."
Good point. In my experience you really need someone to open the door for you, even if only just. That's what draws you in. Once in, momentum takes care of many things, but if you don't get led in at this stage, you could give up easily. I lost a good number of years without such a mentor.
Interesting post, akkartik. I still use Google Reader and continue to enjoy it so I guess I haven't subscribed to as much as you had. I agree HN and Arc Forum give more focused subjects and primarily rely on Reader to keep up with version updates, and new blog posts by people who I follow who don't have regular new post patterns. That primarily saves me a long list of visits to different places only to discover there isn't any new.
Is readwarp.com something you set up? It looks good.
Yeah, old-timers here know I like to talk about readwarp :) I built the website in arc. (The feed crawling pipeline is in python, primarily so I could use BeautifulSoup.)
Portia, have you tried Ruby? That is another beautiful language (and no wonder as it has taken a lot from Lisp).
For Lisp experimentation purposes, Arc is really clean - it doesn't have the kind of cruft that CL has. However, if you are planning to implement a for production project in Lisp, from all I've read, Common Lisp is the way to go as it has a wide and mature range of libraries, which Arc presently does not. And among the CL dialects, SBCL would be a good pick. Be sure to use Zach Beane's QuickLisp utility to find and install CL libraries. IMHO.
You can always call Python from Arc to use some libraries.
A Python dict to s-exp converter is about 38 lines. There's a fromjson.arc (breaks over some input) and a tojson.arc (broken, creates an extra }) somewhere that could help talk to web services.
