I made a number of Google searches of the forms below and averaged the results:

"implemented in <language>"
"written in <language>"

¹ combines Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp, Arc & Clojure
² combines OCaml, (S)ML, Caml
³ summed separate searches for sml and ml

After bumping into a number of local programmers who expressed an interest in functional programming, I thought it might be a good time to start a local group that focused on functional programming languages, so I did a couple days ago.

TriFunc.org is a group for programmers who are interested in functional programming languages and live near the Research Triangle area of North Carolina.

If you live in the area and have an interest in functional programming languages, feel free to dive in and start participating in the Google Group discussions. Once we reach a critical mass, I expect we’ll produce a meeting schedule, etc., but that will depend on where the group wants to take this.

"implemented in <language>"
"written in <language>"

I’m very curious to see how these stats change over time, so I’ve added a calendar item to recompute them in six months. Leave a comment if you’d like to add a programming language to the list, and I’ll update this article and it will be included in the recomputation six months from now.

¹ combines Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp, Arc & Clojure
² combines OCaml, (S)ML, Caml
³ summed separate searches for sml and ml
Update 4/23/09 added C#, Tcl per comment requests.

I’ll be posting other articles (personal, humorous, etc.) to my family blog.

In the process, I’ve become more familiar with nginx, SliceHost.com & WordPress and will likely be sharing about that later.

Astute readers may have noticed that my original plan to create the family blog using some whiz-bang technology was abandoned in favor of good ‘ol WordPress. Hopefully this is only temporary. I’ve been learning Haskell and looking into Clojure, Arc & Qi, so I’d like to be able to demonstrate some cool bleeding edge stuff in the near future.

Regardless of that, I have to say that Haskell is one of the coolest programming languages I’ve encountered. I highly recommend Programming in Haskell. It makes learning Haskell a joy.

The motivation for the split is the feeling that a lot of my non-technical family & friends grow weary of weeding through a lot of techno-geek material to find anything interesting, and folks who read my blog for technical info probably don’t want to weed through the silly videos, etc.

Wordpress has worked fine for my blog thus far, but I want to take the opportunity to develop my personal blog in a new technology more for the learning experience than necessity. I haven’t had time to select the appropriate technology, so I have a bit of analysis paralysis.

The candidates are:

• Ruby on Rails: I currently develop primarily in Ruby on Rails, so in that respect it would be the logical choice and easiest way to get started; however, it wouldn’t have the benefit of learning a new technology.
• Arc: I had high hopes for Arc when Paul Graham first released it. I still think it has potential, but that potential is limited by Paul’s interest level and available time. It’s been over 3 months since the last release and that was only a small incremental improvement. The forum seems dead, and the fact that Arc went through a 5 year blackout period makes me wonder whether it will be a dead-end language and a waste of valuable time.
• Common Lisp: I am leaning toward a Lisp, so if Arc doesn’t pan out, Common Lisp would be a good fallback language. It’s much more mature with robust implementations. It doesn’t provide a nice batteries included experience though, and I’ve been reluctant to collect the necessary libraries from various sources to allow anything remotely similar to Ruby on Rails with respect to ease of development. I think it may have a greater long term potential though, so it may be worth the effort.
• Scheme: The PLT web server may give me a head start on a Lisp based web site, and Arc is based on MZScheme, so it’s on the short list.
• Haskell: I know very little Haskell (even less than Lisp which is not much), but I’m intrigued by many aspects of the language. GHC seems to be a great compiler that produces well performing programs. My initial impression is that it will take more effort to learn than a Lisp, but in terms of brain stretching, it has a lot to offer. There is a Haskell based web server available, but like a lot of fringe languages, it appears to be pretty rough around the edges.

I have a vacation coming up, so I think I’ll use some of the down time to do some research and make a decision. Look for the blog bifurcation to happen in the latter half of June. If you have any opinions on the matter, please add a comment :)

Announcement
Language Web Site
Software
Tutorial
Forum

They recommend using version 352 of MzScheme because the latest version apparently breaks Arc. I already had 360 installed and was in a hurry, so I tried it, and most of the tutorial seemed to work fine except for the web server which failed. I’ll try later with 352 and see how it goes.

The language is still quite volatile, so I’m not sure if anyone is too interested in investing a lot of time creating libraries yet, but when the language settles down, I’m very curious about the acceptance level of Arc.

It seems to have quite a bit of Lispy goodness, and I’ve agreed with Paul’s language philosophy from what I’ve read about what he wants Arc to become. Hopefully it will live up to those ideas. On the one hand, I can see benefits in having a standard such as the one for Common Lisp, but on the other hand, Ruby & Python have done extremely well with the BDFL model with Matz & Guido, and I think Paul Graham could pull off that role if he wants to.

A problem with a “standards” approach is the proliferation of implementations dividing the community; whereas, the single implementation languages seem to have a more unified community.

If Arc can retain the best of Lisp, add some niceties from other languages and attract an active developer community, I think it may become very interesting.

rlwrap

Probably one of the best things I’ve gotten out of the Arc release so far was a tip from a guy on the forum on how to add readline support to the Arc REPL using rlwrap. I’d never heard of rlwrap before, and it’s awesome! I can now get readline support for logo and arc without needing to rebuild them with native support.

sudo apt-get install rlwrap
rlwrap logo

What a great idea :)