I am as big an Arc fan as the next guy, but I can't say it looks any more exciting than PHP. I am highly interested in it being released, however. It seems to me that if you're at the point where you're rewriting internals for speed, you're at the point where it works well enough to be released. If you just release it without any guarantees or claims about its goodness, sure you might get bashed all over the internet, but also a lot of people would use it and modify it for themselves, and maybe some of said improvements might be useful to you. The YC admissions cycle is over, so maybe you have time to do this now.

Well, the YC funding process has just moved from application to interview stage, so they have a little while to go there.

You're right about the expectations, though. I mischievously wonder if it should be initially released in a source form that requires a lot of work to get it running. That way you skew things away from casual users who aren't going to get much out of it, and towards enthusiasts who will be congratulating themselves for building it or finding some weird RPM of it on BitTorrent.

If Arc ends up looking like PHP then I think it's fair to say that Paul's going to get bashed pretty badly indeed.

I know Arc is way better than PHP and was even before it existed (IMO a language that doesn't exist is better than PHP). My point in the first sentence was that all we can see of Arc is this web page, a replica of which could be created in PHP with little or no change in the user experience.

Anyway, the bashing part would presumably be because some of it isn't finished, or because people don't understand some of his decisions that he didn't explain, not because the language is bad. I theorize based on what's been written about it that Arc is a quite nice language to use, particularly for Lispers.

Did you hear that the Inkling guys are rewriting their entire site in it? It must be ok.

Uhmm... that was an April Fool's joke. Not sure if you intended for there to be sarcasm in your post.

A little too dry I guess today. It was a good April Fool's joke though.