I think it's way too early to comment on whether Arc will create a Lisp revival. I believe that the official development team currently consists of a couple of guys, and I expect at least one of them has a very busy schedule, so Arc is a part time gig.
Arc went through a "quiet period" from 2003 to 2008, and it's currently in a mini quiet period.
For me, it's way too early to tell whether Arc is worth a significant investment in time or not. The potential seems be there, but the actuality could be different.
I think pg has many responsibilities, and it's quite possible that other demands on his time could cause Arc to stall for a while (i.e. 2003-2008) or flatline.
I can see rejecting .. to disallow access above the tree, but rejecting / doesn't make any sense to me. So we have to just plop everything down in one directory? If so, that's ridiculous. I think I need to be less critical of the forkers.
Hehehehe. It's not that we're deliberately forking off - it's more that:
1. pg has been talking about this language for years
2. he has built up a big fan club
3. he released arc in a "not-quite-done" state and unleashed a firestorm of third-party fixes
4. he hasn't updated arc again for more than a month or so.
So yes, although we're not deliberately forking off, I fear this is just what will happen unless pg updates us all again within the next few months, or puts major parts of Anarki in Arc3.
Within Anarki all the file serving was done out of the special docroot directory (at least it was a month ago). I'm not sure if disallowing "../" is what we want or if it what we really want is to ensure that all file serving comes from that dir.
Ok, I'll bite. Why do you want to opt out of the karma system? I can understand simply not caring about it, but I'm curious why you feel the need to "opt out" of it.
Continuing to create new ids seems like a pain and is confusing to other users. If someone were to want to find an old submission of yours, for example, they may have to search through 3 collections of submissions - one for each user.
When the karma "leaders" was introduced, I found myself paying too much attention to my standing and stressing about what I should be doing to get more karma points and "beat" the next person. I rapidly decided this was silly and counterproductive, especially for meaningless points. Since I lack the willpower to just stop looking (especially when the karma score is at the top of every page), I figured the next best thing was to blow my karma by starting a new account, which forces me to not care about my karma score. I don't mean to cause confusion, let alone start an internet meme :-)
See Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" for more discussion of ways to force yourself to behave rationally. (This is also the motivation behind the startup stickk.com)
I'd suggest proposing a feature to pg to accomplish what you want without having to continually create new userids. Since he's provided an anti-procrastination feature, he may be open to the idea.
BTW I thought it was interesting that someone (not me) gave you a karma point on your post about not wanting karma points :)
This must already sort-of exist: check out pg himself (http://arclanguage.org/user?id=pg). He's got 1190 karma, whereas almkglor, the current leader, has "only" 660. So somehow, pg's opting out of the "leaderboard" system, at least. If that's the case, it should be in news.arc somewhere (I'll look if I get the chance); of course, there could be some other reason I'm missing.
Expectationmanagement may be as important as the particular plan, or lack thereof.
Arc is unusual in that there was some activity very early on followed by a very long period of little publicly visible activity (prompting much speculation), then a flurry of activity since its release in January. So, the expectations of how Arc might unfold probably vary widely.
Is pg gathering feedback to go back to the lab for a few more years in silence, or will there be a consistent effort to work toward a '1.0' release, and if so, approximately when will that be, or is the plan something else entirely?
And maybe I'm the only one who has these questions :)
Given that Anarki exists and appears to be updated reasonably frequently, it seems likely that, unless pg does something, sheer genetic drift will cause Anarki and ArcN to diverge enough to become separate and incompatible dialects. If someone makes a killer app in Arc, and uses Anarki-specific extensions, it may very well be that merging ArcN into Anarki may be too difficult and possibly even counterproductive (e.g. if too many names in an Arc3 conflict with names on Arc2-based Anarki).
If it goes on for longer, both may even evolve into entirely different languages (like Scheme and CL). Might make a good study of memetics and the origin of programming languages ^^.
"Remember, too, that languages are not primarily a form for finished programs, but something that programs have to be developed in. Anyone in the arts could tell you that you might want different mediums for the two situations. Marble, for example, is a nice, durable medium for finished ideas, but a hopelessly inflexible one for developing new ideas."
"...if a language has to have a toplevel to be convenient, and mandatory type declarations are incompatible with a toplevel, then no language that makes type declarations mandatory could be convenient to program in."
