Keith Devens .com

Entry 1052

There's a lot of new info over at Paul Graham's site on Arc, his unfinished dialect of Lisp. He has about 14 pages worth of info about the language and how it differs from Common Lisp and Scheme. There's also a faq now. Check it out.

Also, check out what he says about being popular, which he wrote as "a kind of business plan for a new language" (in other words, his plans for Arc and his five questions about language design. I like his philosophy - programming languages are for people: "Programming languages are for hackers, and a programming language is good as a programming language (rather than, say, an exercise in denotational semantics or compiler design) if and only if hackers like it."

I was going to mention this before as part of my blurb about Arc above. He seems to have taken some of his progarmming language philosophy from Perl. Functional languages have always been for the "ivory tower" folk, or for random companies that happen to do something successful with them, like the bulk of Yahoo's stores is programmed in Lisp. Functional languages by and large haven't been "successful" the way Perl and C have been successful - see worse is better. Hopefully Graham can be the one to make a functional language that hackers actually like.

Hey! Look at that. Paul Graham was actually the guy who wrote "Viaweb stores" before it was sold to Yahoo. Didn't know the connection before. I was wondering where I saw the article about it. Turns out it was Slashdot, according to Graham, but I still can't find the article because Slashdot's search sucks. And why do they show the date but not the year that an article was posted?! Anyway, here's Graham's article, Lisp for Web-Based Applications.

I'm not going to link to any more of his articles here. Just check them all out for yourself.

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