Arc (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:36, 23 October 2018

Revision as of 02:22, 1 November 2018

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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 | publisher = GitHub}}</ref>

In the essay ''Being Popular''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html|title=Being Popular | first = Paul | last = Graham}}</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:

{{Quote | 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.}}