Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don’t want to spend even one day dealing with character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that’s almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.
I sympathize. Unicode is definitely non-trivial. However, it’s not that it’s offensive, per se, but less useful. I can’t even spell my name correctly with just plain ASCII.
I don’t think it will matter for the exact kind of people who will be hacking with Arc (i.e. Bearded White Anglo Saxons), and it almost certainly doesn’t matter for “quick and dirty” programming, which is the language’s express purpose (which, to me, really means you never plan on writing programs other people have to use). I imagine at some point Mr. Graham will change his mind and break everyone’s apps and all will be well again.
I don’t think it would be forgivable in a “serious-minded” language, though. This fellow here puts it more eloquently.
edit: So, Paul Graham addressed all the cumulative whining in typical alpha-hacker style: “everyone else just doesn’t understand my genius”.
I think we all just mean slightly different things when we say “high level language”. Mr. Graham specifically means, “languages where writing fancy algorithms is easy” and the rest of us mean “languages where writing fancy programs is easy”. Usually one implies the other, but in my case, most of my itch-scratching side projects requires some handling of non-ASCII characters (that’s the bitch with dealing with the internet, or metadata you didn’t generate).
