Thanks for posting this! Arc is really a great language - I use it every day to power my Chinese e-commerce site (there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support). Libraries are no longer really a big problem: with aw's additions in Anarki, it's really easy to call Perl and Python libraries, in addition to all of those from Racket. And Anarki has a healthily growing set of indigenous libraries as well.
The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).
there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support
Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the priority list.
Nope, they were bogus then too. I was hacking a Chinese website at the time. Basically what happened is PG didn't use utf8 and didn't check to see if it worked, but it did anyway. From the very beginning,
(def 什么 () 1)
(什么) => 1
worked. Python, for example, can't even do that. As is often the case, the people complaining didn't even bother to try it out to see what they were actually complaining about.
There were a few tiny places that needed improving (I know, because I wrote most of the utf8 improvements in Anarki), and they almost all revolved around parsing / producing web-related utf8 stuff.
Python 3.1.1 (r311:74543, Aug 24 2009, 18:44:04)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def 什么():
... return 1
...
>>> 什么()
1
Interesting, I thought pg had said the unicode support came after the underlying scheme system started supporting it, which came later. I guess I'm mistaken about that.
The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).