Chad Clark's Open Journal : 2008-01-30

1) Paul Graham announces the release of the Arc language.

http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html reads:

  We're releasing a version of Arc today, along with a site about it at
  arclanguage.org.
  
  ...
  
  Arc is still a work in progress. We've done little more than take a
  snapshot of the code and put it online.
  
  ...
  
  I suddenly realized a couple months ago, it's good enough. Even in this
  unfinished state, I'd rather use Arc than Scheme or Common Lisp for
  writing most programs.
  
  ...
  
  Once you release something and people start to build stuff on top of it,
  you start to feel you shouldn't change things. So we're giving notice in
  advance that we're going to keep acting as if we were the only users.
  
  ...
  
  I went to a talk last summer by Guido van Rossum about Python, and he
  seemed to have spent most of the preceding year switching from one
  representation of characters to another. I never want to blow a year
  dealing with characters. Why did Guido have to? Because he had to think
  about compatibility.
  
  ...
  
  Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc
  compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But
  it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to
  interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with
  character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that
  supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost
  offensive
  
  ...
  
  Arc tries to be a language that's dirty in the right ways. It tries not
  to forbid things, for example. Anywhere I found myself asking "should I
  allow people to...?" I tried always to say yes. This is not the sort of
  language that tries to save programmers from themselves.
  
  ...
  
  Being dirty in the right ways means being wanton, but sleek. I don't know
  if Arc can honestly be described in such enticing terms yet, but that's
  the goal. For now, best to say it's a quick and dirty language for
  writing quick and dirty programs.