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comment by mk

    What criteria are you using to measure success?

The creation of a language with the desired characteristics.

    And what would an unsuccessful new language be?

One not created.

My comment doesn't regard the qualities of Arc itself. I really enjoy it, but I am not a serious programmmer, and my experience is limited. I just think that it's ridiculous to call an unused language a failure. Paul is far better off for creating Arc. He has implemented his vision, and now he can go from there with all of the lessons learned if he chooses.

I definitely wouldn't equate the creation of a programming language with "participation". There is far too much effort and risk involved. It's creation.

I suspect that if Zach Tellman had created a programming language, he wouldn't consider calling someone else's a failure.

    By the way what became of the Hubski conversion from Arc to Racket?

It stalled after rob05c burned out on the project. He was doing all of the heavy lifting, and tbh, it wasn't fair as I was pouring my energy into Forever Labs at the time. He did us an incredible service not only with the partial conversion, but with getting most of our data on SQL, rather than the insanity of files that news.arc used. (Tellman is wrong about that. There's no way that HN is the same news.arc implementation just with more memory thrown at it.) Hubski is partially Racket. I think rob05c was right, there isn't good reason to choose Arc over Racket, and it would make more sense if Hubski was completely converted.

I really should commit myself to all new code being Racket. The syntax isn't that different.