Let’s Paint It Blue
January 31st, 2008
Paul Graham: “I was surprised to find the day after releasing Arc that the single biggest criticism of the language was that it didn’t support Unicode. Then I thought about it, and I wasn’t so surprised. The number one criticism of anything complicated is always going to be about the color of the bicycle shed.”
Arc detractor mindset: “Hmm, a language that claims that claims to be superior to Perl/Python/Ruby/Whatever. Hammer on libraries and Unicode instead of engaging on something more relevant to programming language design. Also, try to sound bitter and wise if possible.”
January 31st, 2008 at 4:17 am
This is really weird — apart from it being yet another Lisp dialect that will hardly make things easier to understand in spite of possibly reducing code size (is it time for a “size isn’t the only thing that matters” comparison again?), I do agree that unicode may be something to postpone when writing an initial proof of concept of a programming language.
However, he has to keep in mind, that the lack of unicode support effectively renders the language useless for any kind of real-world project for the time being.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:54 am
Ah, it’s funny when it’s not me.