I did find lib/ns.arc, which rocketnia had done apparently back in 2011...

Modules and packages are related, but can be implemented independently. The package system is just for discovering and fetching code. Modules keep it separate and help avoid mistakes caused by interface overlap. Honestly, we can probably do without modules if we're careful - for example, emacs doesn't have namespaces, just a prefix convention.

Even if Arc doesn't get much attention itself, it still benefits from the work going into Racket.

So there are a lot of libraries available. (Arc's Racket integration still has a few rough edges, particularly regarding keyword arguments, but there are workarounds.)

That could be a killer feature, but I don't think we have it developed yet. I certainly wouldn't have thought of it. Basically, when I say "killer feature", I'm thinking of the specialization or distinguishing characteristic that we would emphasize in a Quick Start tutorial.

When arc was first launched, the "arc challenge" of building a multi-action website with a form in only ~5 lines of code was the "special feature." Right now, I think hackability and simplicity of the syntax are two of the better things, but we could probably specialize on more.

> IMO doing package integration first is putting the cart before the horse

The purpose for working on package integration is to enable further development. Without the ability to share code easily, it's a lot harder to build on and benefit from community effort. In itself, I agree, a package manager is boring and probably not a killer feature. However, making it really easy to start building something useful by searching for and loading relevant code straight from the interactive console would be a pretty big step.

> package integration first is putting the cart before the horse

I'm simply saying that features like db integration bring users, users bring manpower, manpower will provide package management in a way that ensures it accounts for more use cases, but again this is moot if what you're interested in is only the language development arena. Though I'm not sure how you could prove out a language unless you can actually use it for real world work.

P.S. If you want users, then killer feature would = todo list mobile app with local db in 30 lines of code!

Absolutely true, which is why I do think the Racket integration is important, so we can just wrap its many and powerful libraries in lighter-weight arc libs, and also why I think a decent package system is important. It needs to be easy to share code, and to find solutions to problems. Otherwise everyone spends too much time rebuilding the same wheels.

> features like db integration bring users

Absolutely. I think better db support in arc would be awesome to have. Especially if we can build an ecosystem where "intelligent defaults" are the norm, so that 90% of the time the exploratory developer can get a db up and running with 1-2 lines.

> todo list mobile app with local db in 30 lines of code

An admirable goal. That's actually a great idea of something we could work toward as a community project, each building pieces that eventually come together to make a decent modern app.

I've just been dumping my Arc experiments into the Anarki repository. Akkartik manages it by the policy that pretty much anyone can commit anything, so I haven't had any issues sharing my code. I've recently put a Puredata compiler in Arc in there, https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/pd.arc

That said, there is an Arc package manager, Hackinator by awwx. http://awwx.ws/hackinator

Perhaps that is worth a look?

Arc feels more brief and less strict, so in some cases it's more pleasant to use than Racket.

> When I found out about Arc's Racket interop a couple of years ago, I was really surprised that this was not documented anywhere, so I added a section in the Readme.

Yeah, the documentation could use some work. Definitely not our competitive advantage at the moment, though that could be changed if we build on our interactive help system.

Though lately I consider it more likely that a hundred-year language will have a leveled-up conception of "compatiblity", one that assumes orders of magnitude more forking activity. (See "the Zen of Mu" at the bottom of http://akkartik.github.io/mu; Mu is my attempt at building out the foundations for a hundred-year stack. With, perchance, something like Arc on top.) Perhaps Arc shouldn't be a single language but a family of forks (https://lobste.rs/s/n0d3qo#c_rue8pf). Not a single tree but a clonal colony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...). That'll only work if we can make it easy for superficially-incompatible forks to exchange features and functionality back and forth. Which is an unsolved problem so far. So we may well be very far from a hundred-year language.

Be the change you want to see in the world... I'm not really sure how to motivate the community, but I am rather attached to it, even if I have been a very infrequent lurker over the past years. We have had a relatively high amount of discussion over the past few days though...

Some newbie friendly documentation to ns.arc would be great, or perhaps some very simple examples. Have you tried using ns.arc?

  ; my-file.arc
  (= n 2)
  (= my-definition (* n n))
  
  
  arc>
    (= my-definition
      (let my-ns (nsobj)
        
        ; Populate the namespace with the current namespace's bindings.
        (each k (ns-keys current-ns)
          ; Racket has a variable called _ that raises an error when
          ; used as an expression, and it looks like an Arc variable, so
          ; we skip it. This is a hack. Maybe it's time to change how
          ; the Arc namespace works. On the other hand, copying
          ; namespaces in this naive way is prone to this kind of
          ; problem, so perhaps it's this technique that should be
          ; changed.
          (unless (is k '||)
            (= my-ns.k current-ns.k)))
        
        ; Load the file.
        (w/current-ns my-ns (load "my-file.arc"))
        
        ; Get the specific things you want out of the namespace.
        my-ns!my-definition))
  4
  arc> n
  _n: undefined;
   cannot reference an identifier before its definition
    in module: "/home/nia/mine/drive/repo/mine/prog/repo/not-mine/anarki/ac.rkt"
    context...:
     /home/nia/mine/drive/repo/mine/prog/repo/not-mine/anarki/ac.rkt:1269:4

An "Arc namespace" is just a convenience wrapper over a Racket namespace that automatically converts between Arc variables `foo` and their corresponding Racket variables `_foo`.

For some overall background...

I wrote ns.arc when I didn't have much idea what Racket namespaces or modules could do, but I was at least sure that changing the compiled Arc code to more seamlessly interact with Racket's `current-namespace` would open up ways to load Arc libraries without them clobbering each other. It wouldn't be perfect because of things like unhygienic macros, but it seemed like a step in the right direction.

I went a little overboard with the idea that Racket namespaces and Racket modules could be manipulated like Arc tables. However, that was the only clear vision I had when I embarked on writing the ns.arc library, so I approximated it as well as I could anyway. In fact, I don't think the utilities for generating first-class modules (like `simple-mod` and `make-modecule`) are all that useful, because as I understand a little better now, Racket modules are as complicated as they are mainly to support separate compilation, so generating them at run time doesn't make much sense.

I approached this with the secondary goal of letting a Racket program (or a determined Arc program) instantiate multiple independent intances of Anarki. The ac.rkt module was the only place we were performing side effects when a Racket module was visited, and Racket's caching of modules makes it hard to repeat those side effects on demand, so I moved most of them into a procedure called `anarki-init`.

By adding one line to the example I gave...

  (= my-definition
    (let my-ns (nsobj)
      
      ; Load the Arc builtins into the namespace so we can evaluate
      ; code.
      (w/current-ns my-ns ($.anarki-init))

      ...))

I used issue #95 on GitHub to track this task, and I talk about it a little more there: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/95

Before I started on that, I did a bunch of cleanup to get the Anarki unit tests and entrypoints running smoothly on all our CI platforms. To get started on this cleanup, I had a few questions hjek and akkartik were able to discuss with me on issue #94: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/94

I was confused for a second or two, because the current top post on that site is almost identical to the one you commented on a year ago.

How would this be different than git submodules?

Most of the difference would be in the user interface. Git submodules might actually be a great idea for how to implement it, to encourage hacking on and submitting changes to the libraries themselves.

Git submodules don't provide a very friendly user experience though. You have to know the repository url and manage them separately. It's not terrible, but it's extra work, and doesn't handle loading the library in your own, or dependency management. Ideally, pulling in a package would also result in pulling in all of its dependencies, without pulling in multiple copies of the same library the way npm used to.