Cosine Jeremiah and his Musings

I just found out that Paul Graham has unleashed Arc upon the world after years and years of teasing us. This is exciting, particularly for what will happen to Ruby. All of the nifty features that make Arc awesome will be extracted into a few Ruby gems in the next 2–4 weeks, and everything that Paul put into Arc will be available for Ruby.

But Cosine, you might say, Paul developed Arc so that the language would have nifty breakthrough features unlike any ever seen before to make code more concise! Without the base language support for these features, Ruby will not beat Arc at its own game!

Well, someone has already written a library (it should be reformatted properly into one, anyway) in response to the Arc Challenge that implements part of the Arc standard library, exposing for Ruby any language features in Arc that Paul was trying to showcase in the Arc Challenge.

Paul, please give us a challenge that shows a fundamental language design difference rather than displaying a gap in the presently available libraries. I know you are a smart cookie, so you must be hiding something up that sleeve.

Actually, I can think of one advantage Arc has over Ruby. Arc is Lisp whereas Ruby is not, and following from that Arc has macros while Ruby has ugly workarounds to fake macro writing. But everyone already knows that. Hmmm, maybe what we really want to do is have all our Ruby gems and Rails made available for Arc? Arc on Rails, anyone? I think that would be pleasant.