Thanks, grandma.

OK. Now how about database access (with support for prepared statements), regular expressions, and networking?

Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential libraries are in place.

Different people have different ideas of serious. To me, exploratory programming is fairly serious, because that's the kind of programming that generates ideas.

Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.

You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley DB instead of Common Lisp; I wouldn't want to write the logic to do what BDB already does much better and faster (I don't want to implement ACID transactions myself if I decide I need them).

news.arc stores all information in flat files as lists.

Darn.

At least you were kind enough to let us know.

Well you'll be late to the table for Web 3.0 then... ;-)

clarification: Arc should probably have some kind of database hook at some point, not much point in reinventing that wheel when it works so well for many problems. But that's not the point, as the author has repeatedly pointed out.

Which of those are you planning to contribute?

I'd love to see regular expressions as s-expressions in arc - not pasted on as interpreted strings.

Actually I think I have seen a library for MzScheme that does it this way.

Also curious how this would look

It could look like this: (* (+ "a" (* "b"))) for: "(a+b)" [Perhaps you prefer not to re-use + and * for this.]

Sure, it's somewhat more verbose for this toy examples - but every intermediate expression (and the whole thing) is a Lisp-Object in its own right.

You would not even need macros.

Edit: There is a place for macros here to make things less verbose. Just write a macro that 'compiles': (* (+ a (* b))) into the form above.

For convenience you can offer a function that builds RegExps out of strings in the usual way.

There is a public git repo anyone can push to (the so-called git "wiki", or anarki). It contains regular expressions. You could wrap some DB bindings for mzscheme with relative ease.

I think the complaints were more about how pg was originally saying that he intended to never support Unicode. That said, people should realize that UTF-8 encoding/decoding is the zeroth step to internationalization with Unicode.

pg didn't say that. people just made it up.

He did however say:

"It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers." (http://arclanguage.com/)

I certainly interpreted this as ASCII-only (along with presentational markup) was an explicit design decision, and I don't think this is a far-fetched interpretation. Luckily PG has clarified (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111189) that this is not really what he meant, and now everyone is happy and has regained trust in Arc!

What kind of site does it make YC if this is how to get karma?

there is a very different pattern of karma for comments in "big" threads.

On reflection: your reply is ♫♪♫ to my ears. I ♥ good points...

Edit: heh, "thanks grandma" has even more than that.

Edit: btw it's funny that i'm still being upmodded

so someone downmodded all of:

- a simple, popular comment

- a comment suggesting maybe the first one shouldn't have been upmodded so much

- a comment backing off

Why would you downmod all of them? If you like dislike the first comment, you should like the second, and vice versa. And if you're unhappy with me in general for the first two, you should like the third one.

1) How do you know the same person downmodded the three?

2) Simplest explanation for that case would be that he's downmodding the latter two as noise. You can agree to a comment and still believe it doesn't add anything to the topic in which it appears.

I downmodded because the discussion was getting too meta :P

all 3 downmods appeared between quick refreshes.