Name: Anonymous 2008-02-04 10:12
There are features, most notably Prolog-style pattern-matching, that seem to promise great savings in length, but turn out only to be useful for writing a few basic sequence operations like append, remove, and so on. Prolog is a great language for writing append; after that it's all downhill1.
As long as Paul Graham is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Arc are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when Paul Graham looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Arc, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Arc is good enough for him, because he thinks in Arc2.
1 http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html
2 http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
As long as Paul Graham is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Arc are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when Paul Graham looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Arc, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Arc is good enough for him, because he thinks in Arc2.
1 http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html
2 http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html