> This is because while hacking into some other function's global is cool, some day you are going to do this accidentally, and when that day comes, you'll know why a library that used to work suddenly fails.
Isn't that one of the goals of Arc? A hackable language?
That's a good reason if Arc is designed for
average programmers, but pg says it is explicitly
designed for good programmers.
This, it seems to me, is a very different use of "hack." It's more akin to forbidding (scar 'blue 'red), though not quite as severe: the latter is something nonsensical, and though you could hack together a meaning for it, it would certainly break down. The former case hacks around the definition of a function, but is also certain to break. These uses of "hack" are the ugly kind, closer to "kludge", not the beautiful or powerful kind.
LOL. This is where the semi-deliberate delicious ambiguity of "hack is kludge! what you mean? xy is x times y but 23 is not 2 times 3?" vs "hack is elegant! what you mean? e^(i*pi) = -1?" rears its ugly head.
