The reason I use arc: I can't seem to stop. Before arc I tried to learn common lisp and scheme, but they required me to be persistent, and I kept falling off the wagon. With arc, I didn't need to be persistent. That was the concrete, tangible benefit of minimalism for me: the entire experience seemed to cater to me. There were fewer things that were like, "this may seem overly complex, but there's good reason for it, you'll understand when you gain experience." That argument is almost always a rationalization for accidental complexity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_complexity), in my experience.
Eventually I grew more fluent with common lisp and racket as well. You're right that they're more grown-up, and sometimes one needs something grown-up and industrial-strength. But arc was the gateway drug, and I can't seem to outgrow it.
I said this in another thread: "What really got me into arc was writing programs in one split window with the friggin compiler for my language in the other." (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=18954) That's really valuable, because to get really good at programming requires breaking out of every box other programmers create for you. Yes it's more immediately valuable to learn to use a few platforms or libraries. But understanding how they work, the design decisions and tradeoffs that are common to all platforms, that gives you superpowers in the long term.
In fairness, all my experiences predate clojure, which may well have all the same benefits. Several people have switched to it from arc in the past. I'd love to hear about your experiences after you try it out. I haven't much experience with it, though I've heard that the boxes it creates are harder to break out of (https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4v...)
I'm curious what docs you looked at that seemed to require familiarity with lisp. Feedback most appreciated.
These docs (https://arclanguage.github.io/ref/) are the ones I was talking about. I haven't read much, but there's no mention of parentheses anywhere. Also, there are symbols in circles to the left of concepts, e.g. F ! ? M, but no explanation of what they mean.
Generally, the docs seem rather terse to me; there's a lot of stuff that only makes sense now, after reading (http://aphyr.com/posts/301). "Clojure from the ground up" does start slowly, but by the end of Chapter 4, I really understood the idea of recursion and representing code as a tree, something that I don't think I could have got from the Arc docs.
That's fair. I think we worked on the reference because the tutorial seemed pretty good. Do you think we need something in between?
Edit: I thought the tutorial had come up in this thread, but it hasn't. I'm not used to having two questions from newcomers at once :) Are you aware of http://old.ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt?
Ahh, I got a server error when I first tried to look at that; it seems to be working now, though. I've read the tutorial - it does seem pretty good. Thanks for the link :)
