I agree. Of course, there are still some ASCII-based little helper functions, but I recall seeing PG post something in Icelandic characters in this forum after the UTF-8 thing was addressed.
I agree with your comments, and those above, and I actually think it's a huge strength of this project and why I remain interested. I think way, way too much stuff in the software community is focused on DO LOTS OF STUFF RIGHT AWAY GET IT DONE YESTERDAY WAAAAHHHHHHHH FASTER FASTER FASTER!!! That may be the right way to start a company, but it's a really crappy way to build a "one-hundred year language".
I like the fact that this project is moving slowly, and that the community (from newbies like me to pros like Tilton) has time to try things and reflect, and not in internet time.
I'm 36. I've already learned and thrown away about 3 different major development ecosystems in my career. I accept that I'll continue to do that in order to pay my mortgage, but in my own time, when I'm actually programming for fun, I want to hitch my wagon to something that will actually have some lasting value. And Arc (or at least something very similar) is the best-looking option to me at the moment.
I wouldn't be so discouraged. For my part, I'm simply in a mode where I'm working on stuff, and maybe (hopefully?) this is the case for other people as well.
FWIW, I'm trying to get a more robust version of the IntelliJ Arc plugin out the door, and I'm also working a very primitive project management tool in Arc.
Thanks for the kind words, although I also agree with the critique from eds. I do think that there's a core of a graphic design idea that's OK; someone with better artistic chops could probably improve on it. In my defense, I'll say that it scales down very nicely to a 16 x 16 icon, which is what I cared about most.
Actually, given Mr. Graham's artistic abilities, I'm surprised he hasn't thrown something out himself, just for fun.
I was going for a combination of arches, the letter A, and a lambda. Please excuse the black corners; the app is hosted at Google Apps, which seems to have munged the transparent color when I imported.
I don't really see the lambda, but I like the rest. Very dynamic and energetic, and it doesn't feel "forced" into a concept the way some of the other logos have.
I don't think IDEs are really a big issue. Having said that, I'm just about done with a first cut at a plugin for IntelliJ (my REPL is being flaky). I understand that Eclipse is much, much more popular, but I like IntelliJ much, much better. Plus, I suspect the intersection of Java developers interested in Arc and Java developers who use IntelliJ will be slightly higher.
A good IDE makes programming easier, but I don't think that Eclipse fits the bill in that regard. I personally prefer NetBeans for a lot of reasons (IntelliJ is much better, and the most recent versions of Visual C#/etc are getting there). I'm not talking about wizards here; there are some things that I like using wizards for, mainly things that are just tedious like creating web service clients for a provided WSDL, I'm talking about useful things like organizing and navigating source code.
A good IDE helps you with large projects, especially with multiple developers, and a bad IDE is just a glorified editor with a lot of extra clutter. Eclipse is that with a lot of extra bugginess, IMO. Given all of the assinine bugs I've found in it, I'm frankly amazed that anyone uses it, let alone uses it as a platform for their own tools (Flex?).
I'm just getting into Lisp again after being introduced to it in college before learning how to program, and I'm liking it quite a bit. I'm using JEdit and DrScheme for the most part, and it's working pretty well so far. But I'd rather use IntelliJ or Visual C# or SharpDevelop, because I'm lazy and don't want to waste time with stuff that isn't actually programming.
I think one reason that Rails has done so well is that the vast majority of the people who use it don't write much code. Most of the code that they "write" is stuff they got from someone else via one of the forums. It's stunningly easy to build a reasonable though generic-looking site in Rails without writing much code, which makes it great for newbies.
For large projects, in my experience Rails falls flat on its face. When I ditched that company, our developers were spending about as much time running unit tests as they were writing code. That ended up being about as agile as a beached trimaster with torn sails. (Rails didn't force us into that approach, nepotism did. A collection of small Rails apps would have worked pretty well.)
