"That's pretty much all Arc can bring to the table at this stage: a throwing out of all the old cruft that was preventing LISP from moving forward." ~ from the article
If Arc can bring excitement back to Lisp I feel that is a much larger accomplishment than any possible technical accomplishment. Already Arc is being tested by hundreds (thousands?) of people playing with it. It's only going to get better as more libraries get implemented and more people use it. I'm actually really excited about the possibility of building something cool in it.
It may be the case that PG has enough juice to actually get a cult following going for Arc. Wouldn't that be awesome? An active community around a decent version of Lisp, does he really need to accomplish more than that?
It's funny, because the with/let forms in Arc immediately struck me as quite sensible. Both include an implicit 'do', (or 'progn', for the crusty oldsters like me) and so need a bounded number of forms to scan for new bindings. In the case of a 'with' form, there could be any number of terms, to the parens around the list of forms are needed. The 'let' form, on the other hand, only binds a single identifier, so the first and second parameters to the form are always going to be the term name and value, respectively.
Isn't trimming the fat (so to speak) from Common LISP - thus unfettering its development - a far larger accomplishment than that article gives it credit for?
Yes. (spoken by the article's writer). I had no intention of downplaying the accomplishment, just pinpointing it. All that remains is just (just!) performing the unfettered development. Not something to be downplayed either.
