January 30 2008
For quick and dirty programs...
Paul Graham has released an early version of Arc, his ongoing project to develop a Lisp dialect suiting a minimalist taste in programming style. Never one to shirk from iconoclastic or controversial approaches, PG has made a particular point to emphasize that Arc:
These decisions don't resonate with many programmers, as Arc becomes a prominent example of what has in recent years become known as opinionated software. While Arc may no longer be vaporware, it embodies outmoded ideas about HTML prototyping that are distinctly 1990's in origin. To be fair, the choice of using tables or divs for layout is irrelevant to the motivations of "exploratory programming" and rapid prototyping. From my experiences, it's usually faster to build mockups with CSS than nested table hacks anyway. This is doubly true if there's no necessity for cross browser compatibility. So it turns out that this functionality seems to be more focused towards generating controversy than anything else. Would we expect any less from the author of Hackers and Painters?
This Note
Asides