Some of you know that Paul Graham of ViaWeb/Yahoo Stores fame has released his work-to-date on Arc, his new Lisp dialect. The response has been underwhelming(!), so much so that he felt compelled to respond to some of his detractors. After waxing lyrical on the beauties of append in Prolog last week, though, it was this paragraph that sank my battleship:
“This is one reason the source code of Arc itself is so short, incidentally. I did the same thing to it. But my first priority was making applications shorter, not the language. There are features, most notably Prolog-style pattern-matching, that seem to promise great savings in length, but turn out only to be useful for writing a few basic sequence operations like append, remove, and so on. Prolog is a great language for writing append; after that it’s all downhill.”
Ouch! Still, his arguments make for a good read of language design motivation and issues.
