Arc

Arc is a dialect of the Lisp programming language now under development by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. In 2001 Paul Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named "Arc". Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program. In the essay Being Po... more

Arc is a dialect of the Lisp programming language now under development by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. In 2001 Paul Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named "Arc". Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program. In the essay Being Popular Graham describes a few of his goals for the language. Among the claimed design goals are that "Arc should be hackable" and "there should be good libraries"; Graham also proposes: It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were. Paul Graham suggests John McCarthy's original Lisp to have been built... less