I am wandering what's the purpose of people who come here.
Some random thoughts:
1. want to learn about Lisp and Arc
2. want to learn about language design and implementation
3. want to deploy a clone of Hacker News
4. want to use Arc as a daily programming tool
5. want to make a fork :)
For 1, I think bugs in Arc is not too fatal for those guys, we just need to make them aware of those bugs.
For 2, they need to, and I think they would like to investigate those bugs, so I think its better to let them fix those bugs by themself, learning from mistakes is effective. :)
For 3, those people will not tolerant of bugs, but compatibility is also critical for them, both about codes and data. As they need to consider how much work they will need to do when PG release a new version.
For 4, they will satisfied with anarki or other forks.
For 5, as a fork, they need to treat something as a reference, and I think vanilla arc is the most suitable one.
So I think it's more suitable to make vanilla arc as default, as it can make more people happy. Anyone not satisfied with it can choose forks.
PS: I'm in group 3. :)
I'm not sure how far has anarki diverged from vanilla arc, and whether data is still compatibe with it, so I decide to use vanilla arc, and integrate some bug fixes.
PS 2: Of course, if PG can release a new version, that would be the most suitable choice. :)
Ok, I'm outvoted just looking at the votes, so feel free to make arc3.1 the default.
But I still think you're chasing some mythic notion of compatibility. From http://www.arclanguage.org: "Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code." There is no "reference" here; if you want upgrades to be smooth you're guaranteed to be disappointed.
"if PG can release a new version, that would be the most suitable choice. :)"
Even if that new version gets no bugfixes for 4 years?! O_O What if that next version takes ten years to show up? Heck, what if it takes a year to show up. Are you sure you'll still care?
I don't know anybody on this site who still uses arc 3.1. Even my 'curated bugfixes' repo at http://github.com/akkartik/arc was a short-lived thing. It's just the nature of this community to go off on some tangent :)
Have you read the gotchas page? Many of those gotchas I'm talking about aren't minor bugs. They took weeks of pain and in some cases months to come up with a fix. I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone. For example, for several months I thought that arc and racket was just really slow, all it could do was 1 request per second. But it just seemed slow because all my requests were getting throttled because of some code in HN that most sites will never need, because they'll never have that much traffic.
Perhaps the compromise position would be the 'stable' branch of anarki. But I'm not aware of anyone who uses it. I really think that if you want to benefit from this community anarki is the most common baseline, and the whole point of a new site is to give newcomers the benefit of more updated information than the existing site, and to get them using what the veterans here are most familiar with so that they can get their questions answered soonest.
If the community has new ideas should we go try them out, or should we wait for PG to first grant them his permission? I know what he'd do :) And if people here have new ideas it's worth getting them feedback from others as long as we can be responsive to issues when they come up. And I think we're pretty responsive :) Arc is a bleeding-edge language, and we shouldn't try to act otherwise.
(Incidentally, yes, the HN site on anarki is indeed data-incompatible with arc3.1. It hashes passwords with sha512 rather than sha1, for one: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=17278. Which would you use?)
Hold on, I'll post a poll. I don't actually know that anarki is the most commonly used :) I'm also interested in rocketnia's reasoning of this whole issue.
Although not thought every point throughtly, I have read gotchas page for several times.
I'm not against to bug fixes, but I think anarki has go far beyond that.
Take password hash for example, if let me choose, I'll remain it as is. If someone have hosted HN-like site using arc3.1, it'll be hard for them to use anarki instead because of that change.
Ok, glad we can agree on the common ground of bug fixes. Perhaps we should make the stable branch in anarki the default. I'm not sure what's on it at the moment, but it's probably quite close to arc3.1, and we can patch in the biggest fixes to it.
In general, I'm uncomfortable supporting a version that we are not empowered to update. That's basically my biggest objection.
This community has had a culture of letting newcomers come in and show off new ideas to each other. I think that is valuable, so I'm in favor of allowing anyone to update the default version most of us use. But we can agree to disagree on that score :)
(I still think you're WRONG about the password issue :) What'll you do if PG switches the hash in the next release? SHA-1 is insecure, and an insecure default is a recipe for reputation damage down the road. Good thing arc isn't very popular..)
Ideally, I would like to see arc3.1 be shown as default, along with a pack contains seperated patch files to critical bugs.
And we can treat anarki as a fully fork, with no restriction and full freedom.
About password issue. If PG switches hash, he surely will consider about compatibility, without that, all users of HN will need to reset their passwords.
You: "About password issue. If PG switches hash, he surely will consider about compatibility.."
I'll quote PG and RTM again: "Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code."http://www.arclanguage.org
I interpret this sentence on the frontpage to mean that he will not be concerned about compatibility. Arc is for exploratory programming. If you have users you're on your own. I really don't see how you can interpret it any other way.
The good news is that migrating passwords isn't hard. I've done it for a site myself.
"Ideally, I would like to see arc3.1 be shown as default, along with a pack containing separate patch files for critical bugs."
This could actually be quite cool! Full transparency; we show the default, and we enumerate its biggest issues along with their fixes. That sets expectations in advance. Yes, make it so :)
