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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. Wh

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?

kamaal 8y ago
Not exactly Racket. But with Perl. And the same argument. Early 2010's, I remember my company had a fairly fast, stable and small(LOC wise) data feed processing application in Perl. It just worked, barely any bugs, maintained by 2 - 3 programmers. Time came around, and your Director level people realized the teams were too small, programmers were having too much fun and more importantly it made programmers felt valuable and hard to be treated as kleenex. They decided to give some Architect Astronaut love to the application. Then came in Java programmers. Code base size exploded by 500x. Design pattern floods followed. DI to manage complexity which shouldn't have even existed. Hundreds of classes to do things that could be done in hundreds of lines in Perl. Managers routinely boasted how they managed to grow their teams, about their culture, and how big and great their teams were. They could never make it work as well as it did in Perl. I too moved on. But eventually I saw they just shut down the product. No manager likes to see their work less valuable or better than that of a programmer. Languages like Perl, Scala, Clojure, Racket, Common Lisp are never going to see decent adoption in the industry.
chongli 8y ago
Used it in first year into to functional programming class. We didn't even get to see half the features of full Racket because the class used the student versions. Plenty of my classmates who had been programming in Java for years were getting overwhelmed by it. I know from what I've read outside of that class that Racket is powerful enough to implement any other programming language as a library. A single programmer leveraging all these features can write an application that uses bespoke domain specific languages for every component. This is wonderful for a solo project but good luck passing that on to the new recruit. P.S. guilty as charged. I am an old Slashdot reader.

kamaal 8y ago

Not exactly Racket. But with Perl. And the same argument. Early 2010's, I remember my company had a fairly fast, stable and small(LOC wise) data feed processing application in Perl. It just worked, barely any bugs, maintained by 2 - 3 programmers. Time came around, and your Director level people realized the teams were too small, programmers were having too much fun and more importantly it made programmers felt valuable and hard to be treated as kleenex. They decided to give some Architect Astronaut love to the application. Then came in Java programmers. Code base size exploded by 500x. Design pattern floods followed. DI to manage complexity which shouldn't have even existed. Hundreds of classes to do things that could be done in hundreds of lines in Perl. Managers routinely boasted how they managed to grow their teams, about their culture, and how big and great their teams were. They could never make it work as well as it did in Perl. I too moved on. But eventually I saw they just shut down the product. No manager likes to see their work less valuable or better than that of a programmer. Languages like Perl, Scala, Clojure, Racket, Common Lisp are never going to see decent adoption in the industry.

chongli 8y ago

Used it in first year into to functional programming class. We didn't even get to see half the features of full Racket because the class used the student versions. Plenty of my classmates who had been programming in Java for years were getting overwhelmed by it. I know from what I've read outside of that class that Racket is powerful enough to implement any other programming language as a library. A single programmer leveraging all these features can write an application that uses bespoke domain specific languages for every component. This is wonderful for a solo project but good luck passing that on to the new recruit. P.S. guilty as charged. I am an old Slashdot reader.