Perhaps most psychotic is Paul Graham's family of admirers, which includes me.  We have been clamoring for YEARS for the Grahamster to release Arc, and lo and behold, he finally has.  This news was met with resounding cheers, but even before these cheers had begun to soften, dissenting voices arose.  Many people, far too many people, were quite displeased with the fact that Paul had neglected to support UTF-8.  This move pretty much shuts out the non-English speaking world from using Arc, at least for the time being.  He has also taken some flak due to the languages inherent terseness, almost to the point of unreadability.  Upon reflection over a dinner at Crapplebee's concerning functional programming, the misuses of Python, and many other topics with one John Watson, he mentioned that the code was extremely difficult to unravel based upon its output.  Now if most people said this, I might snort slightly and point them politely towards grep, but Watson knows what's up.  He searched high and low for various strings output by the blog example (not the least of which was how the URL is generated), and came up empty.  Both of us agree that Paul's propensity towards three-letter commands may be hindering the readability of his code, but we are both tremendously excited to be among the first to use an interesting and powerful new functional programming variant.  Imagine being there when McCarthy produced the first variety of Lisp!  The ability to arrive on the ground floor is boundlessly exciting.

Not much else to report.  I added some links to my link page.  Some good sites to check,  I left uncov up there even though Ted has stopped updating, which is extremely sad.  That was one of my favorite sites to waste time on.  The archives are all still there, and all of them are worth reading.

 


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