"You guys are so fast I didn't have time to write anything about it. The purpose is to let users over a certain karma threshold flag spam and troll submissions.
It should only be used for spams and really egregious trolling, not for stuff that's merely vapid or mistaken or off-topic.
Please don't click on it just to try it out. Flags are really being recorded, so flagging something randomly could damage the reputation of the flagger and/or the submitter of the thing that got flagged."
It would have been nice to simply add a tooltip or other means of indicating some clue of what this feature was. Naturally I clicked it hoping I would be taken to a page that explained its use (since there was no help link or other info available).
I then unflagged the post since I realized it was just some sort of boolean indicator. Poor design IMO. Someone could think "flagging" was a way of marking interest or something.
So the community should take the lead, and the leader should follow the community? I have to admit that seems a bit backward to me.
Also, since pg doesn't appear to have an accepted channel for receiving contributions from the community back into the language, having the community take the lead seems to imply a fork which is less than desirable IMO.
I thought it would be cool to be part of new Lisp community also, and it may eventually develop into that, but it's increasingly seeming like just a pet project of pg's that may or may not develop into something more. That's not a criticism - I think it was generous of pg to open source Arc and invite folks to participate, and he's been straightforward with his intentions. It's just a slightly different project than I expected initially.
I'm also a Lisp newbie. If I was already experienced in Common Lisp or Scheme, I might be more interested in investing more time with Arc to learn something new, but at this point, I'm simply looking for the best Lisp to learn. Given that I primarily develop web based software, you'd think Arc might be the one; however the ease of creating simple web apps is offset by the lack of other stuff I need and the question of long term viability.
So, learning PLT Scheme seems like a reasonable course of action because I expect I can bring most of that knowledge back to Arc if it gains more traction. Who knows, if developing web apps with PLT Scheme becomes too painful, maybe I'll just switch back to Arc and give it a few months of learning.
I agree with your comments, and those above, and I actually think it's a huge strength of this project and why I remain interested. I think way, way too much stuff in the software community is focused on DO LOTS OF STUFF RIGHT AWAY GET IT DONE YESTERDAY WAAAAHHHHHHHH FASTER FASTER FASTER!!! That may be the right way to start a company, but it's a really crappy way to build a "one-hundred year language".
I like the fact that this project is moving slowly, and that the community (from newbies like me to pros like Tilton) has time to try things and reflect, and not in internet time.
I'm 36. I've already learned and thrown away about 3 different major development ecosystems in my career. I accept that I'll continue to do that in order to pay my mortgage, but in my own time, when I'm actually programming for fun, I want to hitch my wagon to something that will actually have some lasting value. And Arc (or at least something very similar) is the best-looking option to me at the moment.
I haven't tried it with Arc, but given the fact that it's actively being developed and comes with a web server, I'm considering simply switching to it.
In other words, why not just go to the source? If there's anything that Arc provides that I would miss, it shouldn't be a big deal to add since Arc is just built on top of it, right?
Yeah, there is a reason PG chose PLT Scheme. To begin with, coming back to arc will not be difficult. PLT Scheme has a lot of libraries and code samples. And it's mature and portable. The dialect is still actively being used and developed. All good reasons to use it.
Personally I've finished my website in arc, I just need to do one more move to the production web server. I'm going to leave it in arc and update it as the language is updated by PG / Community.
I think anyone looking for another language should consider common lisp and smalltalk. I've been coding in both recently and it's been a pleasure after I familiarized myself (again).
