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I have been trying to get into the whole Lisp paradigm for 1-2 years now. I own Realm of Racket, amongst a collection of Lisp books. Racket is all the promise
by 616c 10y ago
I have been trying to get into the whole Lisp paradigm for 1-2 years now. I own Realm of Racket, amongst a collection of Lisp books.
Racket is all the promise of developer-centric power tooling that puts Common Lisp to shame.
I recommend you watch one of the core devs, Matt Flath, build a a hygenic macro expander.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or_yKiI3Ha4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or_yKiI3Ha4
Notice how his talk, likely written in its own documentation language Scribble, shows demos of DrRacket. I am more of an emacs guy, but do you see the interactive colorized debugger pointing out variable binding and flow control? That is the only thing that I have seen in the Lisp world that takes SLIME and laughs at its dogged simplicity.
Also, as you watch this talk, observe how he takes the complexity of something I am still certain I cannot do, build a macro system (let alone understand macros others write), and boils it down to the essence with the color-coded schematic to match his environment and visualize his thought process. I dare say Rich Hickey et al would be impressed, tipping the hat to the Simple or Easy talk he is famous for.
If I have bored you at this point, you will probably not check out Rackjure. Someone basically implemented a language subset in Racket of Clojure. So it is safe to say you can subsume Clojure with Racket.
I know we are all smug Lisp weenies, but the whole Brown/NEU PLT group who works on Racket deserve serious praise. I listen to all the core devs and watch their talks, because they push the boundaries of what a good computer scientist is.
They just happened to choose Scheme/Lisp to make me feel dumb. Watch them ditch it and go for Haskell. We will all be sorry then.
- pjmlp 10y ago> Racket is all the promise of developer-centric power tooling that puts Common Lisp to shame. Have you ever used a commercial Common Lisp like Allegro ?
- nickpsecurity 10y agoWe cant entirely blame them: those cost significant money while mainstream stuff usually has free IDE's that are good without limitations. Allegro even mentioned royalties last time I looked at them. Royalties!? Only natural hobbyists overlook this. But, yes, LispWorks and Allegro are very powerful environments. Comparing AllegroCache to Hibernate might be fun for newcomers too. Haha.
- pjmlp 10y agoI guess we were spoiled by being able to have seen such environments, back when it was common to pay for software tools. Even Macintosh Common Lisp would already have been a good experience. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/2/17_Macintosh_Common_Lisp.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat was pretty interesting. Especially that the Mac CL survived so long in about the same form. The one thing that confused me was Apple acquiring "Allegro" Common LISP. That's name of Franz's product. History of Franz says nothing about Apple. I'm assuming they're different products with the same name just to trip us archaeologists up?
- lispm 10y agoCoral Common Lisp was once renamed 'Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp', because Coral went into a marketing agreement with Franz Inc. Apple later bought Coral and its products, and published MACL then as Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL). MACL had technically nothing to do with Franz' Allegro CL.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoNow that makes sense. I just couldnt see one not saying something about other with same name. Tks for the tip.
- Iispm 10y agoLispworks is really nice. But I find the Slime integration with emacs works fantastic when you need to support lispworks/allegro/ccl/sbcl with the same interface.
- mobystrip 10y agoHave you used Allegro? If you had you would notice their gui is single threaded. Segfaults often, and has no color syntax highlighting of any sort. Perhaps Lispworks would have been a better example.
- 616c 10y agoNo, sadly I have not. But I am very interested if I could afford such things and this was not a hobby. Ahmon Dancy talked about his experience doing DB programming for Allegro and they sound, as a group and a generalization, super competent from this talk, so much so I would love to have a reason as a cheap wannabe to use their graph DB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7nEZ3TuFpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7nEZ3TuFpA
- Iispm 10y agoWhat would be some of the things you consider powerful in the Allegro Lisp?
- armitron 10y agoRacket isn't anywhere near close to what CL offers. Your comments make me think that you've never used CL/SLIME extensively. CL and SLIME are geared for __interactive image-based development__. The DrRacket IDE makes you jump through hoops to get but a tiny subset of that interactivity [last I remember, the Racket devs themselves said publicly that interactive development is not a priority to them]. I see Racket as an interesting experiment with lots of applications in academia but compared to CL, it's not anywhere near as pragmatic or capable. To believe otherwise you're simply deluding yourself.
- dleslie 10y agoCider's integration of Clojure into Emacs is reasonably comparable to what traditional SLIME integration for Common Lisp is like, as a user experience. Likewise, Geiser is a sort-of capable mode for most of the other more prominent Schemes; though it is not quite as elegant or polished as Cider.
- sigjuice 10y agogeiser is quite nice. I used it a couple of years ago with racket to work through the first three chapters of SICP, including the part that involves drawing pictures https://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png https://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png
- dleslie 10y agoGeiser is looking for a maintainer for its Racket support, IIRC.
- lispm 10y agoRacket 6.6 doesn't even start on my Mac... crashes immediately.
- soegaard 10y agoI hope you have filed a bug report? (Also - did you use the official version from download.racket-lang.org ?)