"most of your time developing a program is spent writing it, not watching it run."
This totally depends on the kind of program you are writing.
I just completed a class on Information Retrieval, the exact same kind of tasks and algorithms in the Collecting Intelligence books. One assignment, I spent most of the time allocated trying to get the program reasonably fast enough in Python to finish in less than a day. If a mistake was not apparent until the program had run for a couple of hours, it totally killed all of the exploratory programming advantages that Python has.
I finally gave up and rewrote the entire thing in Java a day before the assignment was due. I got my algorithm to converge in under 2 hours (had left the Python version running much longer with than this with no converging in sight), and was able to get some decent results to turn in.
Maybe I'm just greedy. I want it all. Speed, exploratory programming, lots of libraries. Common Lisp offers the first two, the last, not so much. Java offers 1 and 3, Python 2 and 3.
My next languages to learn are Scala and/or Clojure. Potentially the speed and libraries of Java, with many of the features that make Common Lisp and Python great at exploratory programming.
I do not see Arc on a path that will give it all 3 of these attributes in the foreseeable future.
Comments
"most of your time developing a program is spent writing it, not watching it run."
This totally depends on the kind of program you are writing.
I just completed a class on Information Retrieval, the exact same kind of tasks and algorithms in the Collecting Intelligence books. One assignment, I spent most of the time allocated trying to get the program reasonably fast enough in Python to finish in less than a day. If a mistake was not apparent until the program had run for a couple of hours, it totally killed all of the exploratory programming advantages that Python has.
I finally gave up and rewrote the entire thing in Java a day before the assignment was due. I got my algorithm to converge in under 2 hours (had left the Python version running much longer with than this with no converging in sight), and was able to get some decent results to turn in.
Maybe I'm just greedy. I want it all. Speed, exploratory programming, lots of libraries. Common Lisp offers the first two, the last, not so much. Java offers 1 and 3, Python 2 and 3.
My next languages to learn are Scala and/or Clojure. Potentially the speed and libraries of Java, with many of the features that make Common Lisp and Python great at exploratory programming.
I do not see Arc on a path that will give it all 3 of these attributes in the foreseeable future.