As with most criticisms of Arc, these complaints are mostly treating Arc as if it was something other than a VERY early release of a language that's still under development. Both the syntax and semantics of Arc are expected to change as new features are considered/added/rejected.
However, it's easy to see why the author would think of Arc as something more than it is, since it was so hyped by so many people online and since it's been under development for so long. Plus, given the length of time that it's been out, most of us expected more progress by now.
Of course, this doesn't excuse the article's shortcomings, but I think there are a couple of valid points buried amidst the specious ones, so I'll respond to them all one at a time:
1. Criticizing Arc for a lack of features is pointless. It's an early release of the language, and there's no reason why more features can't be added later.
2. Paul Graham wrote an entire article on "Why Arc is not especially object-oriented" which links to several other articles by both himself and others discussing the pros and cons of OOP. The lack of namespaces is a valid criticism at the moment, especially since a lack of a namespace mechanism makes it more difficult for people to write and share Arc libraries.
3. Arc hasn't had enough releases for me to care about having access to PG's version control repository.
4. I'm not sold on Test-Driven-Design for software which is expected to radically change numerous times before becoming stable. I generally write tests after I've somewhat stabilized a codebase, and only then do I make any effort to keep my tests up to date. This is a nuanced issue and I respect the TDD arguments, but this certainly doesn't turn me off to such early versions of Arc.
5. This is another complaint about a missing feature. I agree that this feature should exist, but things like this don't sink the language.
6. Unusual version numbering is a deadly sin?
7. PG's stated outlook is that the more common an operation, the less intuitive its name can be. I don't find "no" less intuitive than "not", although I think he has a point about it being silly to abbreviate "print" to "pr" just to save 3 characters.
8. Line numbers is errors is my personal #1 desired feature for Arc, and hopefully this feature will be added soon.
Interestingly, his conclusion is entirely correct: "In short, if you were hoping for a usable and modern dialect of Lisp, then Arc is not the answer, and won't be without a lot of work." Arc will indeed take a lot of work to become modern and usable for most tasks, and I'm disappointed that PG hasn't put out a new release in over 9 months, but I hope that he'll eventually find time to take a more active role in Arc's development.
