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Ask HN: Companies using Racket?

188 points by ctas 8y ago

Hello everyone, I'm looking for companies that are currently hiring Racket developers or did so in the past. I created https://www.racketjobs.com, because I was myself interested in workplaces that use Racketlang commercially, but couldn't find any. After sharing the site on /r/Racket and a couple of other sites I got a bit more than 100 people to sign up for the newsletter. If anyone knows a company, using Racket, or a place on the web where I can find open Racket positions, I'd be happy to hear from you. Of course I did my Google searches before.

hayden592 8y ago
I enjoyed using it in college during my programming language theory course. However, I thought it was meant to be more of an academic/teaching language. Why should a company use it over Haskell or Clojure?
- dorfsmay 8y ago
  > Why should a company use it over Clojure? Not wanting to support the JVM ecosystem.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    I'll add wanting to avoid any legal risk from its owner, who is very sue happy. They also got that copywritable, API ruling in one battle. I just stay away from anything Oracle owns. Using open standards future-proofs against this a lot.
- mruts 8y ago
  I think racket would be a good choice for internal company tools. It’s batteries included philosophy allows you to create very complex apps with minimal effort. Racket is significantly more expressive than clojure in many different ways (nice gui tools, very sophisticated macro system, good IDE) I wouldn’t want to use racket for applications that would have thousands or millions of concurrent users. For programming in the large, clojure wins by a long shot.
  - dorfsmay 8y ago
    > I wouldn’t want to use racket for applications that would have thousands or millions of concurrent users. For programming in the large, clojure wins by a long shot. Can you explain why? Because it's been used more in big prod envs? Or for reason intrinsic to the languages themselves? If the latter, which ones?
    - xfer 8y ago
      simply because of battle-tested jvm.
      - dorfsmay 8y ago
        The JVM? What about the battle-tested Linux kernel? If you compile your racket apps to a native binary, you can run it directly on the Linux kernel, and benefit from 25 years of use in production! People deploy Golang and Rustlang apps everyday in prod using that approach it seems to work well for them. Note, both languages are younger than Racket.
        mruts 8y ago
        Compiled Racket programs are nowhere near the speed of Rust or Go. Racket's GC is objectively much much worse than the JVM. Of course you can serve millions of users with Racket, like HN. But the JVM today is much better choice. The JVM's GC is world-class and the number of man-hours put in it is probably many orders of magnitudes more than that of Racket's. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/faster/racket-java.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
        dorfsmay 8y ago
        So execution speed, fair enough. FWIW, I've been staying away from Clojure because of the JVM. A lot of us are wearing the scars of the JVM battles!
- hjek 8y ago
  You can write Haskell in the Racket environment[0]. Racket has a lot of well-designed and well-documented libraries that are a joy to work with. In his Racket manifesto Mathias Felleisen (author of The Little Schemer) describes how Racket is supposed to be useful for programmers at any level. I'm currently working on a web app using the Datalog[1] back end. I guess that's very similar to Clojure's Datomic or core.logic, and I'm not sure which is "best", but Racket is certainly good. [0]: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2017/05/27/realizing-hackett-a-metaprogrammable-haskell/ https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2017/05/27/realizing-hack... [1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/interop.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/interop.html
ObscureScience 8y ago
Naughty Dog (game dev) have used it to some extent. This has been up on HN more than once. They have even done a presentation on RacketCon 2013. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12203694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12203694
- ctas 8y ago
  Thank you. I already watched the presentation, but couldn't find any open job positions in regards to Racket. I'll try to contact them directly and will see if I have some luck.
  - 3rdAccount 8y ago
    I think they may have stopped that after being bought by Sony? I don't think it is still around.
    - tyscorp 8y ago
      I think they still use it for scripting in their games. For things like AI, etc.
      - CodeArtisan 8y ago
        They are using an in-house variant of Scheme known as DC. There are a few pages about it in Game Engine Architecture, a book written by an engineer at Naughty Dog. https://www.gameenginebook.com/ https://www.gameenginebook.com/ DC is compiled to bytecode then interpreted. DC compiler is written in Racket.
mruts 8y ago
A long time ago, I was using racket at the largest hospital in Massachusetts analyzing DNA sequences of MS patients. I used racket to create a GUI that allowed non-technical biologists to create custom bioinformatics pipelines. I found Racket to be great and highly productive. If you are looking to use racket at work I would recommend you look into working as a software engineer for academia. If you are the only engineer around, you get to use any language that you want.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  To just offer a possible contrary perspective: nobody else is around to tell you you're using the wrong tool for the job. There's many fine options for each domain and yeah, you get the choice of them if there's no established languages. But be careful not to go off the deep end on using your favourite langauge for everything. On small teams it becomes increasingly important to endeavour to objectively scrutinize your own choices as best as possible.
  - mruts 8y ago
    I agree with you, though being a lone developer sometimes allows you to be more flexible in the tools you use. At the hospital I used Racket, Haskell, C, and R. Because my programs didn't need to talk to each other, I was free to write each utility in what best suited the job. On a team I think there's a lot of pressure to just use what everyone else is using, which can lead to sub-optimal results.
    - Zyst 8y ago
      Yes, but if the hospital ever needs to replace you they are SOL
      - mruts 8y ago
        Any developer worth their salt should be able to pick up a new language in a couple days. I'm not sure why some developers are so adverse to learning anything new.
nestorD 8y ago
Having discovered the TCL programming language because of a single person using it in a bioinformatic lab I can second the recommendation.
- swiley 8y ago
  TCL/TK is probably one of the most underrated GUI frameworks out there.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    I once tried it; well, Expect specifically, which is really an executable wrapper of TCL with a library loaded. I ended up ditching it and using ruby's "expect" library. I remember having issues with scope. Expect functions you call would manipulate the scope of the caller. So when I wrapped some code in a function and called that in its place, things wouldn't work, because state wouldn't be handled in the same scope anymore. That means I wouldn't be able to abstract anything. No reusable units of code. I'd have to keep expect's calls all in the same scope. TCL and Expect seem pretty cool in concept, but Expect's implementation seems awful.
    - Cyph0n 8y ago
      Tcl/Expect are both heavily used at Cisco for router and switch automation. But recently, we've been shifting to Python for testing and automation, which I think is a step in the right direction (e.g., pyATS[1]). [1]: https://developer.cisco.com/site/pyats/ https://developer.cisco.com/site/pyats/
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I used tkinter python bindings, very fun. Zero mental burden. Also tk was used as Digital Domain (James Cameron FX company) Nuke compositing software. Sooo.. I guess it's fine.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  TCL/Tk is used heavily in finance/wall street.
dorfsmay 8y ago
Great initiative. I often wonder why Racket isn't used more in the industry, especially when you see much more niche languages being used... One note about your site: You are subscribing people to a mailing list without sending a confirmation email?
- ctas 8y ago
  Thank you. I like the idea that Racket tackles each domain specific problem with its own language. I'd also be happy to see it used more often in the industry, especially since there's a growing ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, and other resources that ease the start into Racket. Regarding the subscription: I'm using Mailchimp. A confirmation mail should've been sent out, if you subscribed. I will look into it. Thanks for pointing that out.
- hamandcheese 8y ago
  I think by definition Racket not being used in industry makes it more niche than those "much more niche languages being used"
- chongli 8y ago
  Racket is too powerful to be used by big corporations. The last thing a company wants is to have their rockstar programmer leave behind a terse, arcane, impenetrable walnut of an application. Languages like Java make it much easier to treat your programmers as interchangeable parts.
  - squirrelicus 8y ago
    This is true issue irrespective of the company's bigness.
  - WalterGR 8y ago
    Racket is too powerful to be used by big corporations. The last thing a company wants... Ah yes, The Slashdot Cynicism. Guaranteed to get a +5 Insightful. What is your experience with Racket? Or failing that, Scheme? Or, failing that, Lisps in general?
acbart 8y ago
I just finished teaching Racket for 2/3 of the semester. I have never had a group of students hate their introductory programming experience the way that they did with Racket. 0/10 will never teach Racket again the rest of my life, no matter how much I enjoy functional programming.
- tephra 8y ago
  I would love to have some elaboration. Why did they hate racket?
- nicolashahn 8y ago
  Please say more - what was so hateable about it?
- jasim 8y ago
  Why didn't they like it?
- Zuider 8y ago
  Genuinely curious as to why this was so. Did these students have prior programming experience? Was their reaction due to a particular fault of Racket or would they have disliked any language to which they were not accustomed? Perhaps their reaction was to the idea of functional programming which would have provided a distressing challenge to intuitions developed through object-oriented or imperative programming? What textbook did you use?
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    I would suspect that at least part of it is the same reason that I disliked having Pascal as taught as doing my programming introduction course: It's not a main stream language and it's sufficiently different that you cannot directly apply what you're taught in most commercial settings. The languages they will be using in the future, or expect to be using in the future are C-style object oriented languages like C# or Java (depending on where in the world you live). It's not that languages like Racket, Rust, Haskell or even something like Prolog and other languages aren't interesting or useful, in many cases they're a better fit for your problems. It's just that without the background in the C-style and object oriented languages it's pretty hard to appreciate the more "niche" language and the problems they solve.
jahs 8y ago
I have a work available at the moment, but a bit quirky as we're using our own novel Racket-influenced scheme dialect for business workflow, coupled with Python. Happy to chat.
- ctas 8y ago
  Great to hear. How can I contact you? You can mail me at cihan(at)tas.fm
  - jahs 8y ago
    Just sent you an email, thx.
pflanze 8y ago
We are working on a product written in Scheme. It's mostly just me currently. Not (currently) using Racket, but a set of libraries[1] on Gambit-C, as well as an interpreter written in C++[2]. We might take someone on board a few months from now (London/UK). [1] https://github.com/pflanze/chj-schemelib https://github.com/pflanze/chj-schemelib [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045890
- spacesuitman2 8y ago
  What about Racket's ability for arbitrary languages via #lang, not just macros? Are there any plans for this? It's really nice to be able to do #lang c and just write C that is FFI'd into racket so you can avoid using an external toolchain to compile.
  - pflanze 8y ago
    I don't really have a use for this. Gambit-C allows to include C files or also strings of C code from a Scheme module and builds it as one. I haven't used Racket's FFI though, perhaps the real benefit is from parsing the C code to auto-generate bindings? Generally I'd like to reduce the use of C code in case I want to re-target the code to run in a different, not C based, environment. chj-schemelib will need work for general consumption, let me know if you want to use it. (If you're talking about the interpreter in C++, it's the other way around, write FFI declarations within C++ to allow Scheme access to C++.)
fgheorghe 8y ago
Another programming language?
- hambos22 8y ago
  Racket exists since 1995
- spacesuitman2 8y ago
  Racket is unlike many other programming languages, firstly it's a lisp. Secondly, it features a builtin language framework that allows you to seamlessly interop different languages through racket. Once you learn racket you realize that most other languages are just macros in racket, or a #lang in racket, and that their unique implementations are mostly quite wasteful, as they make interop hard.
pmatos 8y ago
We, at Linki Tools [0], use Racket for our main product: S10 [1]. Not hiring at the moment but most likely will in the near future. I always hire remote (contracting up to now) and by the time I have to hire remote for racket I don't think I will have any problems finding a fine dev. If you're in the Frankfurt area, I will be presenting at the first After Work Racket [2] on Thursday, the 8th. Come join us. [0] https://linki.tools https://linki.tools [1] https://linki.tools/s10 https://linki.tools/s10 [2] https://www.meetup.com/After-Work-Racket/events/253939676/ https://www.meetup.com/After-Work-Racket/events/253939676/
- thibran 8y ago
  Hi, I found your meetup and would really like to join - too bad that the company I work for is holding a conference at this day (www.talentthinking.de). So I may join for Episode 2.
jolmg 8y ago
I was surprised to see that you charge $100 for a 60-day post. Is that typical of job posting sites?
- ctas 8y ago
  It's actually cheap compared to other job boards, which usually charge 250+ for 30-60 days, giving you access to a pool of highly relevant developers. Not trying to say, that it couldn't be free of course.

fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago

This is a bit funny to post in hacker news which was written in arc, a language built on Racket and serves large numbers of people.

hjek 8y ago
Indeed, and Arc has some brilliant ideas, but if you ever tried to hack in it, you'd experience how dog slow it really is. But Arc's web framework is implemented in somewhat low level MzScheme and is entirely different (and much slower) than web apps in Racket's[0]. Part of what makes Hacker News fast is that the page only has 4-ish images (if you count the invisible gif that is used for indentation) and a tiny amount of JS. [0]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  Yeah, but that's sort of the point: for most web applications, most performance issues are not the result of the implementation language but of the chosen architecture. If a fairly inefficient language like Arc can handle HN loads (for the most part, at least), almost anything can.
  - hjek 8y ago
    > for most web applications, most performance issues are not the result of the implementation language but of the chosen architecture. I don't think that's true (but I also don't understand what is meant by architecture in this context). There's a simple file upload form example in the Arc community repository. It's so slow that it would timeout on files smaller than 100K. I tried optimizing the POST request parsing, but could still only barely get Arc to handle file sizes of 5M. Tried making a similar simple file upload form in Racket, and it runs way faster. But it shouldn't be surprising that some languages are less efficient than others, right? I'm also not sure that most web applications are text-only. Many web applications send and receive other things that plaintext.
    - pflanze 8y ago
      > But it shouldn't be surprising that some languages are less efficient than others, right? A long time ago I read a comment somewhere saying that Arc is interpreted (as in by a program itself written in MzScheme, instead of translated down to MzScheme), which struck me as odd but I didn't check back then, so now I finally went and looked through the Arc history[1] and release 0 already does the translation, so apparently that was just wrong. There can still be reasons why Arc could be slower, though, I remember PG's design called for overloading function calls so that e.g. hash table lookups could be written like function calls, and if implemented naively this could cost a slower than usual type check on each function call and prevent optimizations applied by the MzScheme/Racket compiler like perhaps function inlining. But just a different parsing infrastructure could explain it too (working on strings-as-vectors vs. lazy lists would make a large difference, but I couldn't get down far enough to see how that's implemented; srv.arc in parse-multipart-args uses regular expressions, not sure that's what you optimized?). Anyway, new code always has large potentials for optimization (early lisps were very slow, today's implementations are generally very fast; same was/is true for Java, JavaScript, ..). [1] http://github.com/arclanguage/anarki http://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

Zyst 8y ago

I know Scheme, I am currently learning Elm. I like picking up fun languages. I also like working with them when possible. But I think the implication that a hospital board can confidently hire a developer that is "good", or one that will make good decisions in their behalf is wrong. For proof, see the OP of the thread. Their decision, I believe, directly harms the hospital's interests. He has essentially become irreplaceable, because they don't have the necessary skill set to confidently hire someone who will be able to replace them. Even if, in the best of cases, OP leaves for a better paying/what have you job hiring someone to fill their void will be hard. That's not what bothers me most, however. It's the attitude. It's us as developers going: "I picked the best tool for the job, and thus this solution will be intrinsically better for the business". Like we're doing them a favor. We're not doing them a favor, even if the tool is superior for the use case the difficulty of finding other people who could take over you introduces an amount of risk that almost no business that understand the full implications would allow. Worst case scenario, the tool(s) might need to get re-written from scratch. And the new versions could have bugs the old ones don't, or poorly handle all the one million edge cases that pop up over time. But the arrogance to say we are picking the best tool for the job, while really picking a tool we wish to use to satisfy ourselves intellectually is what bothers me. If you are forthright and say "Hey, using this will make me happier at my job. And I will thus presumably perform better, and I'm the person in the position to choose what we use" I think that's fair enough. Again, it's the conceit of looking at a business person in the face, and telling them that this tool is the best for the job, when it clearly isn't. It might be the best tool to programatically encode the job. I can concede that. But I feel that is willful blindness on the part of us programmers to the needs of the business in the pursuit of serving ourselves. And again, that bothers me. But you might say "Fair enough, and I was in the position to make that call, so I did". It's not like we exist to serve businesses. But to reiterate for the last time: To say this is being done because it is the best suited for the job at hand is wanting to have your cake, and eat it too.

p4bl0 8y ago

We use Racket to teach functional programming in the first semester of the first year at my uni and we never have such horrible feedback from students. We use it again in a compilation course in the first semester of the third year of the same curriculum and it works well. Could you elaborate?

a1369209993 8y ago
Not the querient, but my first experience with Racket was something to the effect of: > (cons 'foo 'bar) ! error: bar is not a list There were several other condescendingly-reported gross implementation defects like this, most damningly a inability to define macros, which meant that Racket is not in fact a LISP, and the syntactic homogenity that makes LISPs annoying to work with (at the benfit of being able to generate and rewrite arbitrary program fragments on demand) serves no purpose whatsoever. I later found out that this was apparently due to having been provided with a "teaching" version of the interpreter intended for beginning students (who presuably don't know any better), which makes it even worse. I would definitely characterize my attitude toward Racket as "hate", and if acbart made the same mistake my (generally quite reasonable and competent) CS professor did, I wouldn't be surprised if their students felt likewise.
- spacesuitman2 8y ago
  That's unfortunate. Perhaps people should be informed about `#lang racket` first, but I'm not sure how you missed this. It's fairly easy to see in the documentation.
- dzpower 8y ago
  It does sound like you were expecting a full Lisp and instead were greeted with one of the Beginner Languages, intended to teach first time programmers in a very structured way. See https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/htdp-langs.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/htdp-langs.html The example that you give is not an error in full Racket: Welcome to DrRacket, version 6.12 [3m]. Language: racket, with debugging. > (cons 'foo 'bar) '(foo . bar) Similarly, full Racket has multiple, powerful macro systems, and more besides, deliberately excluded from the Teaching Languages. * * * I'm not an academic, but the community and core Racket team are incredibly supportive, and any Comp Sci professor running into difficulties teaching a Racket-based course can easily access plenty of support and guidance, starting by contacting the user mailing list.
- soegaard 8y ago
  As you point out: Racket is different from the teaching languages.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I later found out that this was apparently due to having been provided with a "teaching" version of the interpreter intended for beginning students (who presuably don't know any better), which makes it even worse. I think you still misunderstand; racket doesn't have different interpreter/compiler versions with different language features, racket code explicitly can request different languages via a language directive (I think there is a corresponding UI option in the Dr. Racket UI.) Among the preinstalled options are a series of teaching languages designed to accompany the textbook How to Design Programs, among others.

btown 8y ago

Some people think in dependency graphs. But it's much more common for people to think in steps. I put two apples in the cart, the cart has two apples; I put two more apples in the cart, it has 4. Something like Racket that forces you to think about what you want, rather than helping you iterate to get there, is going to be harder to teach to new programmers unless they already have this type of thinking experience from advanced mathematics etc. It's possible that the class wasn't primed to learn functional programming before imperative programming.

adjkant 8y ago
I think the idea is that a course using Racket or one of its teaching language has to teach that style of thinking, and any course that doesn't teach it will be doomed to fail. HtDP is a great example of how to do it right, which puts the design process in steps rather than the programming steps. I suspect the parent comment failed in this aspect of the course.
- acbart 8y ago
  Possibly. Of course, there is little evidence that the HtDP curriculum "does it right" while all others fail to do so. It seems to have a strong cult following, with little evidence to back up its touted advantages over other approaches.
  - adjkant 8y ago
    I never said all others first of all, I just know that's one example I have a lot of positive firsthand experience with. Generally as well it's not like curriculum approaches have any evidence either way, so while there may not be evidence, I would ask what curriculum does have evidence that it's better than another. I've done some digging explicitly in that area and there's really no good evidence for anything from language choice, object oriented vs functional, everything. Not surprisingly either, it's quite the hard problem to solve and get rid of bias towards one approach in a study to start with. I'd say this though - a "cult" following I would note as a likely symptom of a good curriculum, one that does such a good job that it inspires those that go through it to advocate for it strongly. Is that not itself evidence of some indirect sort? I'd say it's better than most out there. In terms of its advantages, I think a reasonable person can decide if both the advantage is actually an advantage and at least gauge how a curriculum fares on executing on the advantage. For example, the ramping up of difficulty from the teaching languages. Instead of saying "theres little evidence", I would go through the curriculum and its advantages (and disadvantages) like that.