Arc's Out
Paul Graham’s fabled lisp dialect is now publicly available. It only supports ascii, because Paul doesn’t want to “spend a year dealing with character sets instead of making the language more powerful”—nevermind that utf makes the language more powerful—and its html libraries all work with tables only, because “Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.”
It’s baffling that he won’t support unicode, when MzScheme, which Arc is built upon, supports it natively.
The article also contains gems such as “Tables are the lists of html.” Seriously, go see for yourself. It appears that Paul Graham doesn’t know html has lists.
Despite that, I’ll probably end up playing with Arc at some point.
