Dude where’s my charset!
In 2001, Paul Graham announced that he was working on a new LISP dialect called Arc, and today it was released for the public (although still unfinished). There’s plenty of languages to choose from, and only time will tell how successful Arc will be, but it will certainly get attention.
Now, I don’t mind that it compiles into MzScheme, an implementation of the Scheme programming language. I don’t mind that it doesn’t have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures. What I - together with the rest of world that doesn’t have English as their first language - do mind, is the fact that it doesn’t support any other character sets than ASCII. Come on! Not even ISO-8859?
Granted, Graham probably didn’t have the entire world as a target audience when creating Arc, but only supporting ASCII is a giant step back to ancient times. What’s next? I’m surprised Arc doesn’t have pointers and C-style macros. Last time I checked we were in 2008, not 1972.
I’m sorry, it might be low blood sugar, but this is really annoying me. I live in an international world, building applications that transcend borders. After all, isn’t that one of the great things about the Internet?
Other programming languages have thankfully gotten support for Unicode, and some have even had it built-in from the start. In this day and age, Unicode support in applications should be as natural as anything else, and while it doesn’t require support in the programming language, it certainly helps.
Graham is right when he writes that Arc isn’t for everyone.
I notice you didn’t use any Unicode characters in this post…