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Arc was recently released as an abstraction layer on MzScheme. Much has been said about the design philosophy and the lack of innovation.

The most significant blunder in the release of Arc is the absence of a packaging system. People are excited to be a part of the new community and share code that could wind up being in a standard library. There’s a potential chain reaction that will now decay without easy code sharing.

Package management is an ugly problem, but there are many preexisting systems from which to learn. If the masses had to wait several years for the language axioms to be defined, what’s another 6 months for nifty package management?

Of course, the rebuttal goes something like, “PG didn’t want to, write it yourself.” Understood and partially agree, but one of the Arc founders should have implemented package management before the public release. Not because it’s wrong to punt, but because all the excitement from the initial release will have worn off by the time that a proper mechanism for sharing code is available.