Yes, you can create an environment in every language to help you write very short web-apps. I still dont get the point Paul wants to make with his Arc example. Your Ruby solution looks a lot more readable to me. Also my PHP solution, which is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108625

Maybe Paul wants to elaborate, what from his point of view the advantages of his ARC example are?

I'm pretty sure both Wee and IOWA, two Ruby Web frameworks (and each about 5 years old) can do this out of the box.

(Wee was more a prof-of-concept. IOWA is still under active development)

The Arc version doesn't depend on continuations. All you need for this is closures.

We are not interested in implementation details but abstractions I think. It's like to do a session-cookie based implementation and say that we don't need closures at all, just imperative programming with cookies.

it's very strange you are continuing to argue against 100000 people. Just you didn't picked the right example to show your point.

A dialect of Lisp that's coincise has his space in this world without challanges, if developers will like it eventually it will get some kind of user base. I don't think languages are adopted because of challenges in the real world, nor that this challenges can really show that the language is worth something: it will be automagically clear once a language adds some abstraction that is truly novel and useful, like it happened for garbage collection, for functional programming, OOP, closures and so on.

Not only this, a language can even gain success even being almost feature-equivalent with others just because the designer had a better taste, like it happened to Ruby.