Market.

Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usually) can't fund it themselves.

Arc, however, is explicitly aimed at the high end. It's meant to be a "LFSP". And smart people can write Arc themselves (and have ;-)). They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves.

Hence the contemptuous reaction, and why I think Arc is in more trouble than either Viaweb or YC. It's not really a problem when your peers are contemptuous, because that just means they're less likely to compete with you. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.

If I were in charge of Arc marketing, I'd position it as the "PHP for the ones that PHP forgot". PHP initially got its start as a way to throw a quick & dirty webapp prototype up on the web, and then incrementally refine it. But around version 5, it started getting complex and adding all these features from Java. That's left a vacuum at the bottom of the web language market. Rails and Django tried to fill it, but the average Django user is quite a bit more sophisticated than the average PHP user circa 1999. And Arc's design is already pretty well-suited to throwing a design up on the screen quickly.

Right now, the majority of Arc users seem to be disenchanted Lispers. Disenchanted Lispers tend to be smart people, and they also tend to be interested in language design. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. On arclanguage.com, I've seen one person write an app with the language, and several dozen people write enhancements of the language itself, either in the form of macros or as hacks to the interpreter itself.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

But, I'm coming to the tech world after having worked in the health care industry for 15 years. And, I studied art for 6-7 years, thinking that I could make a career out of it. So, I guess that I have a different perspective on the geek/hacker culture. And, something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this--the nastiness.

Paul referenced it in his article, referring to the trolls. I just don't understand why people troll like they do. I didn't understand why people were so up in arms about Paul's trying to write a new language and offer it up for public consumption. I don't understand why people have been so quick to criticize Y Combinator. I don't understand the hating that goes on in language flame wars, or OS flame wars.

I understand that people are passionate about technology, and passionate about their language of choice, or OS of choice, but... really. Do people really need to get nasty about it? Why aren't people able to have a discussion about the merits of a language, or strengths and weaknesses without getting personal or mean about it. I just don't understand.

A great doctor that I worked with, was explaining to me why he got out of teaching at a medical school. What he said struck a chord with me: The reason that there's so much back-biting and politicking in academic medicine is very simple--it's because the stakes are so low.

Which leads me to ask the question--Are the stakes really so low in the technology world, that people are so nasty? I have a hunch that for many trolls, that's really true.

I know that shortly after reddit got purchased the trolls made camp and set up a small troll swamp. There are a few cool sub-reddits, though. Why did that happen? Because the stakes became so low.

I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly.

I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?

What you seem to be saying is that being smart automatically makes people good at language design. And you are just dead wrong. Being smart may make you a good language implementor, but there's little correlation between that and the kind of skills you need to be a good language designer. Some of the worst languages in the world were designed by smart people.

It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.

The Arc users on arclanguage.org don't seem that contemptuous.

So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language.

That seems a good sign to me. Munging the language is what you do with Lisp, like numerical calculations are what you do with Fortran. So what this means to me is that the users are real Lisp hackers, using the language as Lisp is meant to be used.

Plus I explicitly said that at this stage I'm mostly interested in the core language, and that I want to hear new ideas in that department.

- Albert Einstein

That probably overestimates the difficulty, though. A significant fraction of the applications are from people with perpetual motion machines, etc. Those are invariably single founders. If you discount those, maybe it's only 2 or 3x harder as a single founder.

I would encourage you to try and find a cofounder though-- not just because it makes you more likely to be funded by YC, but because it makes your startup more likely to succeed.

If you want to downmod, it's no big deal. But there seems to be some proportion of the audience that feels vindicated in their views just because the opposite view was downmodded. Downmodding does not make opposing positions less legitimate.

These people seem to be different than the ones who write replies. I've had multiple lengthy threads where I hardly get any mods either way while discussing, and then when I wake up the next day I have -20 karma, but no new replies.

That's not a troll behavior ("troll" comes from the fishing term), and it's much less common here than on reddit or digg or (god help you) dailykos, where intelligent but unfashionable opinions get sunk hard.

There are only a few fashionable subjects around here (the importance of lisp, for example), whereas on other sites almost every question has a boilerplate answer, against which all opposition is "trolling". At any rate, no amount of actual "trolling" is as bad as groupthink. I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

ADDENDUM: Just thought I'd tack this on. Near the top of digg right now is this:

http://digg.com/business_finance/What_1_Million_Buys_In_Home...

That's sort of an interesting subject, but look at the comments. At the top with 9 diggs:

I dugg the story, but I refuse to click on anything with Forbes magazine. They force a full-screen ad (that you can skip) but in my efforts to help stop obnoxious advertising, I boycott Forbes.

Okay, there you have a 15-year-old combining 1) his irrational dislike of full-page ads (perhaps he thinks Forbes survives on government grants), with 2) his irrational proclivity to upmod things without looking at them, with 3) his belief that Forbes cares whether a 15-year-old looks at its slideshows. This sort of sad lameness is actually what kills online discussions, not "trolling".

This is actually what causes that disparity between what people think of new technology when it first comes out and two years later, as long as it still exists: one party was busy developing, the other party was busy coming up with reasons it can't be done, getting pats on the back for being so smart, then riding that dopamine rush to nowhere fast for two years until they meet the product again and just say "oh, I was wrong." Then this cycle continues. That's what PG's essay is about.

But being unable or unwilling to argue semantics does not make the original poster's ideas wrong. The only way to prove a determined person wrong is to engage in direct competition, and from the rear, of course, as the other party is already ahead of you. For obvious reasons, it's easier and "smarter" to come up with "logical" reasons than to "do the full experiment" to show it's wrong. We're not talking about math equations here, so a productive person's potential is more than his writing but also his skills, experience, credibility, and dedication, which can't all be ignored.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa...

followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org:

http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

People have been wondering about that since he was a small child.

Evan is a great product designer. That's his secret weapon.

We hackers are just dying to let others know how smart we are. It's what makes us tick.

So we come here (and other forums and blogs) because most of us have trouble finding peers who even understand what we're talking about. Add in a lack of writing style and the anonymity of the internet, and our puffing and strutting APPEARS to be nastiness.

Put us in a room together to discuss the same subjects and I'm sure it would be much more civil.

Honestly ask yourself. Whenever you heard someone else getting a compliment for being smart, (Alan made the Dean's list!), (Joe is a great chess player!), (Fred wrote the best program I ever saw!), don't you get JUST A LITTLE BIT JEALOUS. You almost want to scream out, "Hey! What about me? I'm smarter than that!" We hold back in person because we're polite. But we don't hold back here, because most of us understand. Sometimes I think that if you DON'T think like that, maybe you shouldn't be a hacker.

Reminds me of an old story that Rabbi Harold Kushner told about a young man trying to temper his competitiveness, so he joined an ashram in Japan. He wrote to his father, "Dad, this environment has helped me evolve to the point of enlightenment where I no longer have to compete with others to achieve my bliss. The meditation has done it. I'm one of the top 5 meditators here, and hopefully, by next year, I'll be Number One."

[UPDATE: I just read the comments about this pg essay on Reddit, and realize that it's different over there. They ARE nasty. What's happened to Reddit? Whatever it is, I sure hope it never happens here.]

So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.