Arc Forum | Interested in being an Arc tutor?

Arc Forum

6 points by jackcouch 3596 days ago | 9 comments

I would like to learn Arc and could use some help and I'm willing to pay for it. I'd like someone that is a really great programmer (I hope to learn from one of the best) to commit to helping me for 3 hours per week.

My programing experience is limited to 6 months pasting together a C# asp.net app 10 years ago. My wife and son are also going to be learning, but I'll be the interface for them.

Once I get a handle on the basics I'm thinking that the best way for me to learn is to try to build a contact management app I've been thinking about for a long time. My hope is that within a month or two my tutor can spend most of his time showing me how to improve my code and letting me read code he/she wrote as part of this "class project."

Since I don't have the expertise to know who is an expert and who is not, I'm hoping the folks on this forum will help me with that.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

3 points by lojic 3594 days ago | link

I think anyone who is interested in a lisp has been positively influenced by Paul Graham, I certainly have.

You said this in the HN thread:

"I'm sure Arc is the wrong choice if I want to be as effective as possible in 6 months. If Arc is only the best choice if I want to be as effective as possible in 5+ years someone save me ;)"

The specific language is only one aspect of effectiveness - others include available libraries, an active contributing community, etc. I don't think there's reliable evidence that Arc will change enough in 3 years to fulfill your "effective as possible" goal.

Paul's last submission to his own forum has been over 5 years ago! And his last comment has been over 4 years ago. It would seem that he's not actively involved any more.

I was very excited to hear about Arc over 7 years ago, and I had high hopes that Paul might be the person to create a successful lisp and rally a great community. This has not happened, and I think it would be foolish to think this will change much in the next three years.

In the end, I ended up choosing Racket as my lisp - it made my short list to evaluate in part because Paul chose it to implement Arc :)

I'm certainly not trying to "save [you]", but I see many similarities between your quest for the most effective language and my own and countless others :) The language is very important, and concision is important, but you really need to evaluate the entire ecosystem to make a good choice.

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2 points by jsgrahamus 3593 days ago | link

lojic - What did you end up using Racket for?

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3 points by lojic 3593 days ago | link

I've mainly just been learning the language. Working through some tutorials, reading books/articles, coding, etc. Did a few Project Euler problems, and now I'm working through SICP.

I burned a lot of time looking for my (not "the") perfect language, and finally settled on Racket for the dynamic language and OCaml for the statically typed language.

Now I'm trying see which problems are best suited to each of them.

Clojure has a lot of good things, but I've never been able to get past the dependency on the JVM, lack of tail calls, etc., but it's pretty darn concise.

The Racket community is incredibly strong IMO.

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3 points by jsgrahamus 3595 days ago | link

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906375

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3 points by akkartik 3595 days ago | link

I think I might be interested. I've been working on teaching people programming a lot, but haven't really had a chance to teach my favorite language. Are you thinking in person or over video conference?

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2 points by jackcouch 3595 days ago | link

Video (Google hangouts?) when needed, but most of the time (once I'm up and running especially) email will probably be fine.

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2 points by jackcouch 3595 days ago | link

Actually I live in the SF area (eastbay) so if it is helpful to be in person I can do that too. I'm flexible.

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1 point by akkartik 3595 days ago | link

Me too. How about we get together in person to discuss more details?

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2 points by jackcouch 3595 days ago | link

Sounds great. My email is jack8couch@gmail.com. Send me your contact info. Really looking forward to it.

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