Thank you for your opinions; it really does help me clarify my own thoughts. That and I rather dislike talking to myself for more than a few minutes at a time...
Currently, this is an Arc forum. People are drawn here from pg's posts about Arc, and their attraction to the simplicity and beauty of the language. Also probably dreams of silver bullets... That won't stop just because we make a separate community, and I really don't think there's anything wrong with it.
However, I think we're also torn a bit between maintaining basically a bugfix version of arc, or going on to develop it further.
The question then is what "further" means - which direction would it go? One answer is that it can't really be predicted; creating such a community would be a way to find out.
On the other hand I can speculate, based on what I've seen of this community so far.
People come, entranced by pg's vision of arc, and then find out that the code base itself is really small and approachable. In general, lisp variants are used by people who like to make the language fit their needs, but where most dialects would add to the language via macros, with arc (or anarki) people find it just as easy to hack on the core of the language itself. Eventually this leads them to forking it, or building their own implementation in javascript or something.
I suspect this is partly because arc is so small, and does not have many standard libraries or a package system. You can read it all in a fairly short amount of time. So the fact that most of the code is aimed at developing arc means that the easiest thing to develop with it is... arc.
This trend of exploration and extension will undoubtedly continue, and I think it will be much more free to develop into something significant if we simply look at anarki with the slightly different perspective that having a separate community site we could actually upgrade might offer. Instead of being weighed down by arc as the 'community bugfix edition', it could become a 'language based on arc' with a solid foundation, but room to grow.
The core paradigms and strengths of arc appear to be "exploratory programming", and "language hacking". I think it would be cool if we could develop the former beyond the latter, but who knows how it will turn out?
Of course, I may be entirely off-base here myself...
Hmm, you know, a new anarki forum could have the benefit of adding a tags feature for posts. A few good tags could be 'lang-design', 'arc', 'anarki', 'help', etc., etc. Not only would this allow our subtypes of members to zero in on their content of interest, but would make searching for meaningful info much easier. Now that would probably make me jump over.
Yep, improving the forum would help a lot, in a lot of ways.
I've often thought that the structure of the news.arc forum is rather unhelpful for the arc community, especially now that we're so small and lethargic. Conversations can go extended periods of time without comment, so they get locked. Or they fall off the front page, and hard to find again. Neither is conducive to long-term development and improvement; we probably lose a lot of valuable work and ideas that way.
One thing I'm considering as part of developing a new community site is collecting and archiving all of the arclanguage.org content, so we can actually access it. And preserve it, if the site goes down.
But I end up wasting all my time on discussion, instead of actually making progress on that...
Anyone know how long an IP stays banned? Or what I can do about it? Rather inconvenient not to be able to check the forum from home...
I suppose I could set up a proxy or something. And I was planning on scraping everything to a new community site anyway, so maybe I should take this as the incentive to do so.
Looks as though it ranks how bad you are and always keeps the baddest of the bad-asses in cache, while never deleting any from disk. In a low volume site like this I doubt you'll get out of it without contacting them.
I did ping the HN admins about the lock period a year or two ago, and they were kind enough to extend it for us. It's now 90 days, if I recall correctly.
