 | Where are we going? |
| 33 points by stefano 5905 days ago | 85 comments |
|
| I've been following Arc since the beginning, like many of you. I've seen it
going from a growing community of ideas to a shrinking community too small to
improve the language quickly. The problem, though, is not the size of the Arc
community right now (this is still a young language after all) but the fact
that Arc lost its momentum: instead of attracting new people, users now go away
from here. How did we get to this situation? What has changed? On day 0 Arc was
launched as a prototype for a programming language. Some ranted about the
deficiencies of the implementation (slow, no Unicode, useless error messages,
no debugging facilities, etc.), but they were acceptable because it was a
prototype. The goal of a prototype is to give the users a feeling of the
language, so that they can contribute by saying what's wrong, what's good and
what's missing. The author(s) should then discuss with the community to decide
future directions for the development. This is what happened in the early days
of Arc. This period didn't last very long, though. After the release of Arc2,
pg almost abandoned the forum, and feeling the absence of the "boss" many left
the building. Some left permanently, others lurk the forum just to see if it
will come back to life. What the remaining community had was a prototype not
suitable for real world development and not suitable for its role of prototype
because the author wasn't there to listen to his users. This lead to a plethora
of alternative implementations (anarki, rainbow, arc2c, snap, nyac, primitivearc, arc-f, ...),
all trying to overcome the limits of the original, unmaintained version. The lack
of a central authority lead to a dispersion of the few resources (in terms of
people and time) available. New ideas died because the language (together with its
main site) was held by an absent leader. To give one example, not too much time ago,
there was the idea of a central repository of Arc libraries. The right place
would have been under http://arclanguage.org/libs. This is still an invalid link.
Every effort is useless if it will never be part of the official Arc instead of
laying around in some github repository. There are only three possibilities for
Arc right now: pg comes back (Hahaha!), someone takes the lead and makes a
real fork of Arc, not just of the implementation, but also of the community
and of the main site (no more arclanguage.org). The last possibility is to let
Arc die. I'd appreciate the opinion of who is still here (even lurkers) on this post.
What do you think about the history of Arc so far? What do you see in its future? |
