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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
by 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 agoTo 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 agoI 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 agoYes, but if the hospital ever needs to replace you they are SOL
- mruts 8y agoAny 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.
- Bootvis 8y agoI don’t believe it, the internet is full of people that struggle to learn Haskell and even R. For many, it’s not that easy.
- dragandj 8y agoBut they only need to find one such developer; no need to employ the whole Internet.
- eternalban 8y agoHow lucky are you to test your subjective theories [with] someone else's dime.
- JamesBarney 8y agoThis just isn't true. There is a reason people look for devs with years of experience in a certain stack.
- mruts 8y agoAt work we use Scala in a very functional style and Akka. Not a single dev on our team (including me) knew Scala when they started. Everyone was productive with the codebase and programmed idiomatically within a matter of weeks.
- JamesBarney 8y agoI imagine the team was familiar with writing Java, which makes moving to Scala the easiest possible language transition besides maybe a move from C# to VB.NET. Switching to a completely different ecosystem, such as to R, Racket, Haskell and C takes at least twice as long. And could be much longer if you're relying on large framework changes, for instance if you're switching from QT to GTK+ or WPF.
- segmondy 8y agoThose developers ain't worth their salt.
- dasmoth 8y agoThis is a common argument, but I've not seen a great deal of evidence for it on the ground. Rather, there seem to be a decent number of LISP enthusiasts out there who end up working with more mundane languages in their day jobs. If you advertise a LISP position, and make it clear that it really is going to be mostly LISP rather than just a keyword to generate excitement, I can pretty-much guarantee that you'll get applicants. In locations where developers are very thin on the ground (i.e. not Massachusetts...), things might be harder. There's always the possibility of hiring remote.