That is how he seems to work on it, but he talked as if it were so much more. Well, lots of us do that, and I'm not expressing any moral objection. Graham doesn't owe us anything. I'm making the practical observation that I don't think it can ever be a major language if developed this way.
Graham has spent nearly a decade now tinkering with syntax. I think he'd say that he's trying to get the foundation correct, and all the rest can come after that. But I'm saying that, as much as I like his syntax ideas, there is more to the foundation than syntax, that the other issues will inevitably have implications for the basic design, even for the syntax, that his half-dozen friends don't know enough to fully inform him of the state of the art in these issues, and that his lack of interest in enlisting the help of the rest of the world in the foundational issues is likely to render the Arc Project a mere exploration of syntactic tweaks to Lisp, not a major new language.
Graham has spent nearly a decade now tinkering with syntax. I think he'd say that he's trying to get the foundation correct, and all the rest can come after that. But I'm saying that, as much as I like his syntax ideas, there is more to the foundation than syntax, that the other issues will inevitably have implications for the basic design, even for the syntax, that his half-dozen friends don't know enough to fully inform him of the state of the art in these issues, and that his lack of interest in enlisting the help of the rest of the world in the foundational issues is likely to render the Arc Project a mere exploration of syntactic tweaks to Lisp, not a major new language.