Writing a Lisp is not uncommon. Finishing one is somewhat rare. Building a dialect that people will widely adopt is an extreme edge case: Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket and Clojure are about the only consensus successes after 50 years of Lisp. Yes, there's Chicken and AutoLisp and eLisp that are useful for writing against an API, and I've been vague with "Common Lisp".
Arc has a minimalist aesthetic but it has so few resources that it is hard to discuss it as an ecosystem.
Arc was intended to be a 100 year language. Like Clojure the easy starter kit hasn't been built. Its terseness means expressing yourself requires a grasp of Lisp nuance. Arc is not analogous to Racket's Student Languages. Knowing Lisp already is a good predictor of success. There aren't a lot of Arc libraries. There are no Arc books. Maybe there's more than one tutorial, now. The community is not as vibrant as that of the other Lisps previously mentioned.
About the same time [the very distant past in Internet Years] both Paul Graham and Rich Hickey set about killing conversation at cocktail parties with "I'm writing a dialect of Lisp."
Rich Hickey didn't just write a dialect. He didn't just design it from the ground up with no cobs. He built a language community. Paul Graham wrote Arc and then dedicatedly built a community. It just wasn't a language community. It was the YC program and HN and all the common interest that connects to that.
I would not recommended Clojure as a first Lisp for most people. Emacs knowledge, Java Experience, and some Lisp already, are helpful. There's a lot more assumption of Computer science as well. But I would over Arc because you can use Google with Clijure. You can use IRC. You can use StackOverflow. There are Clojure conferences, Clojure consultants and Clojure meetings. There are even listservs.
Arc has a minimalist aesthetic but it has so few resources that it is hard to discuss it as an ecosystem.
Arc was intended to be a 100 year language. Like Clojure the easy starter kit hasn't been built. Its terseness means expressing yourself requires a grasp of Lisp nuance. Arc is not analogous to Racket's Student Languages. Knowing Lisp already is a good predictor of success. There aren't a lot of Arc libraries. There are no Arc books. Maybe there's more than one tutorial, now. The community is not as vibrant as that of the other Lisps previously mentioned.
About the same time [the very distant past in Internet Years] both Paul Graham and Rich Hickey set about killing conversation at cocktail parties with "I'm writing a dialect of Lisp."
Rich Hickey didn't just write a dialect. He didn't just design it from the ground up with no cobs. He built a language community. Paul Graham wrote Arc and then dedicatedly built a community. It just wasn't a language community. It was the YC program and HN and all the common interest that connects to that.
I would not recommended Clojure as a first Lisp for most people. Emacs knowledge, Java Experience, and some Lisp already, are helpful. There's a lot more assumption of Computer science as well. But I would over Arc because you can use Google with Clijure. You can use IRC. You can use StackOverflow. There are Clojure conferences, Clojure consultants and Clojure meetings. There are even listservs.
Good luck.