Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.” Harsh but true.

I’ve never been to Cambridge, and never lived in any city but New York, but I’ll accept Graham’s casual portrayals as plausible. New York is obsessed with money, although I believe that’s more influenced by the ridiculous cost of living than Wall Street. But it is also, I would argue, a city that values achievement, of any kind, above all else. Whether you’re a dancer, fashion designer, diplomat, programmer, or stock broker, New York is where you come to be the best at whatever it is you do. There’s a reason all the city services define their members in terms of superlatives — police (New York’s Finest), firefighters (Bravest), corrections officers (Boldest) and sanitation workers (Strongest).

The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things in common: data structures are functions on their keys, strings are sequences, and lambda is “fn”. But Arc seems to be more in the traditional, semi-imperative model whereas Clojure borrows heavily from functional programming. Arc even has for-loops, for goodness sakes. Obviously, I have no idea what else Paul Graham may have up his sleeve, so maybe there’s much more exciting stuff to come. But for now Arc looks to me like a modest improvement on Common Lisp / Scheme rather than a major new language.