[chris_wot]

Dear God man, please do! I'm into the start of chapter 3 and have suddenly discovered that in fact lisp is not obscure or hard or anything like I was told years ago in high school.

I mean, my introduction to lisp was something to do with concat but it was so divorced from reality that I literally found an early book on C programming and semi-self taught myself it, then found a book called C Pointers and Dynamic Memory Management that literally changed my life.

I have a feeling if I'd read this book I'd have actually done something awesome by now. Frankly, this book might allow me to do something that I've been itching to do for months now.

I can't really express my appreciation enough... but I'll try right now: thank you! A million times over, thank you!

Edit: so Arc - is that like a Webserver based on lisp?

[cageface]

Lisp is a fantastic language and well worth learning.

But these days I pick a language with strong static types every time if I have the choice. I know you can use them with Lisp too to some extent but it's not the same as a language built from the ground up around types.

[gigamonkey]

Totally. I had been thinking about writing a Haskell book but it seems that space is maybe well covered lately.

[KingMob]

Arc was Paul Graham's take on a modern Lisp. There are some cool essays on it, but I don't think the software itself ever moved much past alpha stage.

[brudgers]

It's the language in which Hacker News is implemented and currently developed.

[krapp]

Doesn't HN use a proprietary fork of Arc?

I've never been entirely certain what the relationship is between YCombinator and the Arc community, if any, but one experimental and partially black-boxed forum doesn't signal a mature language, just one adequate to a particular task.

What else have people done in Arc?

[Immortalin]

Arc has served as material for a lot of speculative blogposts and helped create buzz for the lisp community.

[brudgers]

Being a Lisp, I'm not exactly sure what would constitute a proprietary fork. Furthering my uncertainty is that it [Anarki] is built on Racket and that kinda makes it hard to say one implementation is forked from another.

Anyway, I didn't intend to claim that Arc was a mature language.

[chris_wot]

Yeah, I just did a quick bit of reading. Ironically, I think I might be groking lisp because it appears ldap filters are lisp expressions, which I've used quite a few times at work...