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1 point by Pauan 3950 days ago | link | parent

"They ought to have a gentler guide to show them that. It (might be) automatable, but at first it ought to be distributed. You folk obviously have lots of experiences doing things. Could this guide be possible?"

Are you talking about making a guide about guides, or a guide specifically to help people to understand Lisp? I'm sure either one is possible, but this particular community should have a much easier time with the Lisp guide than the general guide.

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea: a single consolidated guide to help people understand the Lisp way of doing things. Of course we've written plenty of stuff already (as have people not on the Arc forum), but it's scattered everywhere and isn't really coherent. Something like the "learn you a Haskell for great good" but for Lisp sounds nice. Is that what you're talking about?

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"you can decide immediately(or within ~10min) if someone's cool."

Even if that's true, that isn't necessarily useful. "Coolness" is arbitrary and cultural. It shifts over time. It isn't necessarily tied to quality. And I think that people who seek coolness tend to produce lower quality stuff. After all, any time and energy spent being cool is time and energy spent not improving in non-cool (but useful) ways. Though I myself am guilty of sometimes doing things for the sake of reputation, I try not to do that.

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"How exactly did you parse it into such a coherent roadmap so quickly?"

I'm just that kinda person: somebody who's quick to read into things. Unless it's rocketnia doing the talking, then I have a much harder time. :P

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"Must I fork my own version of Arc to do it? Is there a simpler way?"

Yes. And as I mentioned, people have already done so. I personally recommend Arc/Nu, though Anarki should work fine too. Also, since the Arc source code is provided, you can of course modify your local copy as well.