Arc's Out

Paul Graham recently released his new language Arc

Some think it is a great step, others think it's a big yawn, many people don't like Paul Graham for who knows what reason.

I read about half of On Lisp, and intend to read the other half at some point, because it really did open up what I thought of Lisp (and I'm already a convert).

But one thing I remember thinking when PG first mentioned Arc's progress, "Wait a minute, one of the main points in On Lisp was you can define your own syntax, so what's new/different about Arc?"

And now that it is out, and I've read the tutorial, I'm still wondering, "where's the beef?"

I've not actually done much more than glance through the downloaded source, and examined the tutorial. The tutorial is a yawn, just some new special forms with shorter names, nothing amazing. I hope the libraries packaged with arc are powerful and interesting - that is what I'd preferred to have seen in the tutorial.

So it seems a big yawn, the language itself is still Lisp, just (barely) less typing.