I've been learning Arc. The fact that so many got disappointed and left soon after release hasn't shaken my interest (at least not yet). It's the only language since C that I know of [1] that doesn't try to protect the programmer from themself. This means you can have more confidence that any problems you run into will be your fault and not the language's.
Arc community is small right now, but the people left are brilliant. I've learned so much by listening to what they have to say, and they've been remarkably friendly to me as a newb.
[1] Please note that I haven't tried Haskell, Erlang, OCaml and some other formidible languages yet. Am I'm totally missing out?
- scala: 2.8 beta is out, people want reliable eclipse, intellij and netBeans plugins, and more time to figure out type system; I think next couple years, a lot of developers are going to be "upgraded from java" via their VP's of engineering; s/b interesting;
- clojure: users are pretty happy; language, compiler and toolset evolving at warpspeed
- F#: people want Vis Stud 2010 out April 12 and 100% bug-free, ;-}
- haskell: people want lots more time to understand it
> [1] Please note that I haven't tried Haskell, Erlang, OCaml and some other formidible languages yet. Am I'm totally missing out?
It really depends on what were your prior languages.
I was C/Pascal/C++/Assembly type of programmer, and Scheme (or video lectures of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) have blown my mind.
Erlang was interesting and useful, but not revolutionary (to me). I should say that hot swapping is something that no other language, as much as I know, currently has. And is cool :)
I'm now learning Haskell, and I like it. First, I understood little, mostly stuff from Scheme. And few weeks ago I had flash and most stuff was easy... (Monads/Functors/MonadicTransforms) It's probably worth the energy I have spent. IMHO some time has to pass for everything to come in place.
[edit] Bunch of other languages have hot swapping: Pike, Lisp, Smalltalk, and Java
It's understandable why you'd say that, of course. Clojure has more libraries, more users and is probably more complete. But is the core language as elegant as Arc's?
halloway's pragmatic Clojure book is still quite worth reading, but describes a slightly pre-1.0 release (if you can borrow or browse Halloway's book in a bookstore, i would do that).
Go follows quite closely in the spirit of C, and doesn't try to protect you from yourself (but also doesn't give you complexity just for the purpose of helping you hang yourself coughc++cough.
Arc community is small right now, but the people left are brilliant. I've learned so much by listening to what they have to say, and they've been remarkably friendly to me as a newb.
[1] Please note that I haven't tried Haskell, Erlang, OCaml and some other formidible languages yet. Am I'm totally missing out?