Arc (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:04, 8 August 2015

Revision as of 13:05, 8 August 2015

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In 2001, [[Paul Graham (computer programmer)|Paul Graham]] announced that he was working on a new [[dialect (computing)|dialect]] of [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] named "Arc". Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the [[Hacker News]] web forum and news aggregator program. Arc itself is written in [[Racket (programming language)|Racket]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://arclanguage.github.io/|title=Arc Programming Language}}</ref>

In the essay ''Being Popular''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html|title=Being Popular|work=paulgraham.com}}</ref> Graham describes a few of his goals for the language. While many of the goals are very general ("Arc should be hackable," "there should be good [[Library (computing)|libraries]]"), he did give some specifics. For instance, he believes that it is important for a language to be terse:

<blockquote> It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were. </blockquote>

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A program used by Paul Graham to illustrate Arc's terseness.<ref>[{{cite web|url=http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html |title=Take the Arc challenge]Challenge|work=paulgraham.com}}</ref>

It produces a form with one field at the url "/said". When the form is submitted, it leads to a page with a link that says "click here", which itself leads to a page with the value of the original input field.

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===Official version===

The first publicly released version of Arc was made available on 29 January 2008,<ref>[{{cite web|url=http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html |title=Arc's Out (29 January 2008)]|work=paulgraham.com}}</ref> implemented on top of [[Racket (programming language)|Racket]] ("PLT-Scheme" at that time). The release comes in the form of a .tar archive, containing the Racket source code for Arc. A tutorial<ref>[http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt tutorial]</ref> and a discussion forum<ref>[{{cite web|url=http://arclanguage.org/forum|title=Arc discussion forum]Forum|work=arclanguage.org}}</ref> are also available.

The forum uses the same program that [[Hacker News|news.ycombinator.com]] does, and is itself written in Arc.

=== Unofficial versions ===

Due to the slow development of the official Arc branch, some members of the Arc community started unofficial repositories with unofficial emendations, extensions and libraries. One version, '''Anarki''',<ref>[{{cite web|url=http://github.com/arclanguage/anarki Anarki Repository on Github]|title=arclanguage/anarki|work=GitHub}}</ref> permitted<ref>[{{cite web|url=http://arclanguage.org/item?id=17707|title=Arc MayForum 2013- announcementAnnouncement: anarki is no longer world-committable]|work=arclanguage.org}}</ref> anyone to submit changes to the project. The community-managed wiki<ref>[{{cite web|url=https://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki|title=Arc TheLang arc language wiki]Wiki|work=google.com}}</ref> is a better source of information than the official site at this point.{{citation needed|date=December 2012}}

'''Rainbow'''<ref>[{{cite web|url=https://github.com/conanite/rainbow Rainbow, an implementation of Arc in java by Conan Dalton]|title=conanite/rainbow|work=GitHub}}</ref> is an implementation of Arc in [[Java (programming language)|Java]].

'''Arcadia'''<ref>[{{cite web|url=https://github.com/kimtg/Arcadia Arcadia]|title=kimtg/arcadia|work=GitHub}}</ref> is an implementation of Arc in [[C (programming language)|C]].

==References==