Paul Graham is still working on Arc
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Paul Graham has a
weblog on Infogami (one of the startups that his venture firm
Y Combinator is funding). He recently did a post on
Why Writing is Harder than Programming. Although the post wasn't
meant to be an update on
Arc (the new dialect of Lisp that he's working on), he did mention
that he has "spent most of this summer hacking a new version of
Arc". When he mentioned that, I remembered that I've been seeing his
name pop up on occasion on the
PLT Scheme Mailing List over the past few months. I did a quick
look through the archives and, in each case, he was asking technical
questions about different
PLT Scheme topics. I wonder if he's decided to
either build Arc on top of some components of PLT Scheme or if he's been
playing around with ideas for Arc and is using PLT Scheme as a test
bed for the ideas. If he's decided to build Arc on top of PLT
Scheme, he has certainly
picked a
pretty decent Lisp implementation to use.
Hmm, a quick google
shows that Paul has also been playing around with
Scheme48 over the summer (and he
put the kibosh on speculation that he was building Arc on Scheme48
then), so he's probably just looking at
different lisp implementations, the design decisions they made, and
considering features for inclusion with Arc. If so, I
hope he's looked at
Gambit Scheme and
Termite as well - it would be neat to have a lisp
implementation that is built with web programming and
Erlang-like
concurrency in mind from the start (that was what
CROMA was going to be, but Patrick is tied up with his studies at
MIT at the moment).
