Arc (programming language)

Infobox programming language
name = Arc

caption =
file_ext = .arc
paradigm = multi-paradigm: functional, procedural, reflective
year = 29 January 2008
designer = Paul Graham and Robert Morris
developer =
latest_release_version = 0.1
latest_release_date = 29 January 2008
latest_test_version =
latest_test_date =
typing = dynamic, strong
implementations =
dialects =
influenced_by = LISP
influenced = Anarki
operating_system = Cross-platform, runs on the MzScheme interpreter
license = Perl Foundation's Artistic License 2.0
website = http://arclanguage.org/
wikibooks =

Arc is a dialect of the Lisp programming language now under development by Paul Graham and Robert Morris.

In 2001 Paul Graham announced [ [http://www.paulgraham.com/arcll1.html Arc at 3 Weeks (Paul Graham)] ] that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named "Arc". Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News [ [http://news.ycombinator.com Hacker News] ] web forum and news aggregator program.

In the essay Being Popular [ [http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html Essay:Being Popular] ] Graham describes a few of his goals for the language. Among the claimed design goals are that "Arc should be hackable" and "there should be good libraries"; Graham also proposes:

It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.

Paul Graham suggests John McCarthy's original Lisp to have been built wholly on a small set of "axioms", and maintains that Arc ought to be constructed in a similar way, even when that means the language may not have features that large organizations want. Specifically, Graham feels that object-orientation is not useful as OO methods and patterns are just "good design," and he sees the language features used to implement OO as partially mistaken. [ [http://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented] ] [ [http://www.paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html Arc FAQ] ]

A controversy among Lisp programmers is if, and how much, the S-expressions of the language should be complemented by other forms of syntax. Graham feels that additional syntax should be used in situations where pure S-expressions would be overly verbose, saying, "I don't think we should be religiously opposed to introducing syntax into Lisp." Graham also feels that efficiency problems should be solved by giving the programmer a good profiler.

The first publicly released version of Arc was made available on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 [ [http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html Arc's Out (29 January 2008)] ] . The release comes in the form of a .tar archive, containing the mzscheme source code for Arc. A tutorial [ [http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt tutorial] ] and a discussion forum [ [http://arclanguage.org/forum discussion forum] ] are also available. The forum is copied from news.ycombinator.com and is itself written in Arc.

The initial version has caused some controversy, notably by supporting no other character set beside ASCII, and shipping with a built-in Web development library that bases its layout on HTML tables. This, combined with the hype surrounding Arc and its generally slow development pace, has gathered some unfavorable comments [ [http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6710p/comments/ Reddit: Arc's Out] ] .

The Unofficial Fork

Due to the slow development of the official Arc branch, the Arc community has started its own unofficial fork [ [http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master Anarki Repository on Github] ] , sometimes referred to as Anarki. Anarki was started to continue development after many members of the community came to feel that the development of Arc centralized under Paul Graham had become stagnant. The Anarki version of Arc has two branches: a stable branch that stays as close to official distribution as possible, with just bug fixes and minor feature additions; and an experimental branch which has much more drastic modifications and additions to Paul Graham's version.

This is not a formal forking of Arc, as there is still a desire to keep just one version of Arc. At the same time, the community wanted to see development on Arc continue, which didn't appear to be happening; Paul Graham was not giving any guidance or commentary to the community about the roadmap for Arc.

Paul Graham has recently mentioned [ [http://arclanguage.com/item?id=7933 PG: "I'll have a good deal of time to work on Arc..." ] ] that he may continue development once again in October-November 2008.

References

External links

* [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32766 Latest news from Y Combinator]
* [http://arclanguage.org/ Arc website]
* [http://www.paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html Arc FAQ]
* [http://arcfn.com/ arcfn.com] , documentation / discussion on arc and anarki
* [http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/arcxref practical-scheme.net/wiliki/arcxref] an arc wiki
* [http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html The Hundred-Year Language] , an essay