Bravo. I'm bookmarking this comment. Next time we get a question about fragmentation I'll point to the final section.
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I didn't plan to hack on programming languages when I started playing with arc. Creating new languages/implementations is an occupational hazard of hacking on arc. Or maybe it's a pleasant side effect that we get for free (a viral - and rapidly mutating - language). Depends on how you look at it.
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I think it's beneficial that these variants aren't splitting off into their own communities. They're able to recombine features from each other. wart stole its iteratively-refined interpreter cond from ar. Pauan's gotten me thinking about message passing.