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Arc on Javascript - the new Clojure?
1 point by jsgrahamus 4725 days ago | 2 comments
Read an interesting article (http://wisdomofganesh.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-of-javascript.html) which extols Javascript as the new platform. That got me to wondering about Arc on Javascript. Would it be able to leverage the underlying language and facilities (i.e node.js) and take part in what might be a new emerging technology and platform? If it can and if Javascript really does start to eclipse Java, this might be one up manship on Clojure and its use of Java.


1 point by rocketnia 4725 days ago | link

I've actually been porting Lathe (my general-purpose Arc library) over to JavaScript over the past few days. ^_^ (https://github.com/rocketnia/lathe/tree/master/js)

I consider it to be a prototype of what Penknife is supposed to be like, but with no module system or custom syntax. It's mostly for fun and so I have something to run when my only runtime is a browser, but I wouldn't be surprised if an s-expression parser over lathe.js turned into a pretty viable hack of a language.

That hype about Node.js is a bit exaggerated though. I haven't read this, but it seems like a more realistic explanation of what's going on with the asynchronous IO: http://blog.mixu.net/2011/02/01/understanding-the-node-js-ev...

The important thing for Node.js is that JavaScript has a nice Scheme-like evaluation model with a very high demand for fast implementations. It's at the point where they're practically putting it into hardware, which would essentially mean a new age of Lisp Machines. Pretty nifty and all. ^_^

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1 point by akkartik 4725 days ago | link

You might want to check out the javascript implementation at https://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki/home. It hasn't been touched in over a year, though.

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