It'd be really great if PG would consider doing an alpha release of Arc sometime. To me, there appears to be a mini-Lisp revolution going on right now, largely thanks to PG & reddit. It'd be a shame to let that energy dissipate as people grow tired of waiting for it to come out.
I know the excitement that I have for Arc isn't as much the "100 year language" issue as much as the need to have strong leadership for a Lisp. I think that this is evident by the difficulties the various CLs have when introducing new functionality to the language vs. a package, or the whole R6RS fiasco that's been driving the Schemers mad.
I would second that. At the risk of hyperbole, the "mini-lisp revolution" could be one of the more important things to happen to the state of the art. Lisps just have so much going for them, but common lisp can not be the answer. No idea about arc, but at least there is some potential for leadership to be shown.
People need to just start using stuff for "hobby" projects.
Its possible that lisp could become very popular, due to "language oriented programming" - which is just a silly name to attract people (notice how "DSLs" are now so popular, well lisp is nothing if not a platform for creating a DSL which solves your problem for you). heh, its not anything knew, I think words to that effect are mentioned in the SICP notes.
I had an interesting chat with Emmett last week here at justin.tv. I was whining about having to use Python instead of some kind of Lisp, and he pointed out that the language choices at jtv have been made because of some very important libraries, much more than language features.
If Arc wants to succeed it will need to come out-of-the-box with some great libraries, and it will need to address the issue of how new libraries get "blessed" and made available. Just my humble opinion of course...
I agree ten-thousand percent about libraries, which is part of why I think it'd be just peachy to have an Arc alpha. I think it's ridiculous to expect PG & co. to be able to create a ton of libraries (or any) because they're doing so much work on the language.
At least with an alpha, all of us excited kiddies can start poking around and filling in holes.
Otherwise, we may all have to resign ourselves to the possibility that Perl 6 may actually release first ;)
I know the excitement that I have for Arc isn't as much the "100 year language" issue as much as the need to have strong leadership for a Lisp. I think that this is evident by the difficulties the various CLs have when introducing new functionality to the language vs. a package, or the whole R6RS fiasco that's been driving the Schemers mad.