I think there is no reason to flames here , since we always will have alternatives way to approach a language design , and at end, preferences tend to go from the objective to the subjective perspective of the programmer to choose or prefer a language over the other.
Regard the comparison of Arc with NewLisp , I think the main goal (for now) with Arc is this so-called 'exploratory' programming , where the focus is more on 'playing' with ideas and new ways of design (through a cycle of test-error), and from there on, start and continue the building of a language for 'solving' in a elegant way much of the tasks a general purpose programming language should be able to do ; this approach, opposed to the traditional way of language design where you fight against the problems right away and build the language on top of that fight, could give a sense of slowness to Arc , but at the end,it could result in something cleaner and more elegant than what it is currently offered by many other languages.
This , in no way, means we don't care about optimization of code speed, or probably library and 'real-world' application support , but these are issues coming along in the way of the core Arc design.
