6 ms·

Racket News – Issue 7

119 points by soegaard 7y ago

lunchladydoris 7y ago
I love how personal this feels. This is written by a person for people, not an organization for consumers. Also, if any of the RacketCon organizers are reading, can you please try to get better video this year? There's no way I can attend the conference but I do watch the videos. Last year the quality seemed like a noticeable step down. But, thank you for doing what you do! Racket is one of those languages that I wish I had more reason to use on a day-to-day basis.
- neilv 7y ago
  The author of the newsletter is Paulo Matos, who, in addition to having a friendly and down-to-earth manner, is also a very serious and accomplished engineer. The Racket community has more than its share of people like that. When I was recently looking for someone to take over administering one of the Racket email lists, I was glad one of those people (Paulo) volunteered.
- rscho 7y ago
  I second that. I also would like better quality videos, and if possible one per talk instead of per morning/afternoon, please :-)
- petercooper 7y ago
  If you're into serverless stuff and you like this personal feel, you might like Jeremy Daly's Off by None: https://www.jeremydaly.com/newsletter-issue-35/ https://www.jeremydaly.com/newsletter-issue-35/ .. I think it takes that chatty newsletter approach quite far.
59nadir 7y ago
It might just be my soft spot for Racket, but I find this delightful. Elixir Radar is somewhat the same thing via e-mail but it's not as neat and tidy as this. You can skim this and get so much value out of it immediately.
baldfat 7y ago
Racket is still my preferred language based on how fun it is to use and the community is just awesome.
- neilv 7y ago
  Same here. I have professional experience with various languages, but Racket is my personal preference. It's one of those platforms that many programmers want to use, which is a good quality for a platform to have. I can do almost everything in Racket (except for things like OS kernel, and easy slick smartphone apps), and Racket also gives me better metalanguage features than anything else. The main downsides I see are: you end up doing more things from scratch than you would in many other languages (which occasionally is an advantage), it's not as proven like something like Java (in a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" kind of way), and there are only a few non-academic jobs in the world right now. I originally moved to Racket as a super-productive platform for R&D, and a lot of that could also apply to creative startups trying to get demos and beta rapidly. (For startups, consider using Racket for the sprint to significant funding, at which time you might be rewriting/pivoting regardless of what language you use, and at that time you can decide whether to stick with Racket.) If you're already an experienced programmer, you can get started with Racket quickly, and soon be productive and see some boosts, though you'll need some experience with it before you'll get all the benefits (it's not just Python with parentheses), and you will probably have to do some things from scratch.
  - baldfat 7y ago
    The greatest thing is that Racket is fun the worst thing is Racket is fun, because everyone does their own thing. You can do your own thing faster then finding something and implementing it. It is funny how that is an issue.
- cpach 7y ago
  ”the community is just awesome” I’ll second that. I used to hang out in #racket on Freenode and the people there were genuinely nice folks.
complex1314 7y ago
Makes me want to try Racket out!
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I am going to try to get to Salt Lake City for RacketCon this July. My wife just agreed to make it a fun road trip with me. I planned on going last year in St Louis but something came up. I have been using Common Lisp since 1982, and feel more comfortable with it, but 2 or 3 times a year I will write some small thing in Racket and enjoy it. The Racket ecosystem is fantastic.
- velcrovan 7y ago
  See you there!
mruts 7y ago
The only thing that has stopped me from using racket more are the performance issues. Hopefully Racket-CS will make racket competitive performance-wise with CL. In regards to expressiveness, Racket is definately the most powerful lisp on the market, maybe even of any language, lisp or not. Great GUI library, the most powerful metaprogramming the world has ever seen, FP, static typing (still a little rough around the edges), libraries for xml/json/http and a ton of other stuff, nice OOP libraries, contracts, and a truly awesome IDE. Is there any other language that is as flexible, powerful, and elegant? The only thing missing from the equation is a high performance optimizing compiler and industrial GC. If Racket could get JVM-like performance and a GC that could manage terabytes of heap, it would be the ideal language for me. I used to program Racket professionally in academia, and it works really well for desktop applications. You can whip up complex single user apps very very quickly, with generally acceptable performance. Great for research and data science applications. I now use Scala at work on a computation heavy multi-user finance application and Racket would be unteniable for this use case. High-load servers need the best GC (or no GC) and there are very few languages that work well in this use case. Pretty much just JVM languages, C/C++, Rust, and maybe Go or OCaml. If Racket could get competitive in these areas, it might open the door for commercial adoption. Though, on the otherhand, both Python and Ruby have worse implementations and worse GC and that doesn’t stop everyone from using them for servers. This is a tangent I suppose, but it’s a mystery to me why Racket isn’t more popular compared to Ruby/Python. For data science and ML the network effects of Python are strong, but the networking libraries for Python aren’t any better than those for Racket. Maybe people just think parens are scary? Anyways, Racket is seriously awesome and developed by some great people (professors). If you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend it. Very easy to get started because of the great IDE. PS: Also HN is written in Racket (essentially), so I guess you can wrangle for high-load servers.
- jambutters 7y ago
  always wondered so too. Racket also seems to beat python in many benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/faster/racket-python3.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... , but yeah, i guess people just hate parens and prefix notation.
- 7y ago
default-kramer 7y ago
I found the Featured Paper this issue to be very approachable - only 13 pages including code and not excessively academic: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-automata-macros/paper.pdf https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-au...
chriswarbo 7y ago
The video DSL looks like quite a nice idea. I could see myself using it to keep videos in git: add all the raw source clips once as immutable blobs, then do all of the editing with text. (The same could be done with shell scripts and ffmpeg, but urgh). I wonder how it fits with the ideas of FRAN (functional reactive animation)?

119 points by soegaard 7y ago

I love how personal this feels. This is written by a person for people, not an organization for consumers. Also, if any of the RacketCon organizers are reading, can you please try to get better video this year? There's no way I can attend the conference but I do watch the videos. Last year the quality seemed like a noticeable step down. But, thank you for doing what you do! Racket is one of those languages that I wish I had more reason to use on a day-to-day basis.

neilv 7y ago
The author of the newsletter is Paulo Matos, who, in addition to having a friendly and down-to-earth manner, is also a very serious and accomplished engineer. The Racket community has more than its share of people like that. When I was recently looking for someone to take over administering one of the Racket email lists, I was glad one of those people (Paulo) volunteered.
rscho 7y ago
I second that. I also would like better quality videos, and if possible one per talk instead of per morning/afternoon, please :-)
petercooper 7y ago
If you're into serverless stuff and you like this personal feel, you might like Jeremy Daly's Off by None: https://www.jeremydaly.com/newsletter-issue-35/ https://www.jeremydaly.com/newsletter-issue-35/ .. I think it takes that chatty newsletter approach quite far.

59nadir 7y ago

It might just be my soft spot for Racket, but I find this delightful. Elixir Radar is somewhat the same thing via e-mail but it's not as neat and tidy as this. You can skim this and get so much value out of it immediately.

baldfat 7y ago

Racket is still my preferred language based on how fun it is to use and the community is just awesome.

neilv 7y ago
Same here. I have professional experience with various languages, but Racket is my personal preference. It's one of those platforms that many programmers want to use, which is a good quality for a platform to have. I can do almost everything in Racket (except for things like OS kernel, and easy slick smartphone apps), and Racket also gives me better metalanguage features than anything else. The main downsides I see are: you end up doing more things from scratch than you would in many other languages (which occasionally is an advantage), it's not as proven like something like Java (in a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" kind of way), and there are only a few non-academic jobs in the world right now. I originally moved to Racket as a super-productive platform for R&D, and a lot of that could also apply to creative startups trying to get demos and beta rapidly. (For startups, consider using Racket for the sprint to significant funding, at which time you might be rewriting/pivoting regardless of what language you use, and at that time you can decide whether to stick with Racket.) If you're already an experienced programmer, you can get started with Racket quickly, and soon be productive and see some boosts, though you'll need some experience with it before you'll get all the benefits (it's not just Python with parentheses), and you will probably have to do some things from scratch.
- baldfat 7y ago
  The greatest thing is that Racket is fun the worst thing is Racket is fun, because everyone does their own thing. You can do your own thing faster then finding something and implementing it. It is funny how that is an issue.
cpach 7y ago
”the community is just awesome” I’ll second that. I used to hang out in #racket on Freenode and the people there were genuinely nice folks.

complex1314 7y ago

Makes me want to try Racket out!

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I am going to try to get to Salt Lake City for RacketCon this July. My wife just agreed to make it a fun road trip with me. I planned on going last year in St Louis but something came up. I have been using Common Lisp since 1982, and feel more comfortable with it, but 2 or 3 times a year I will write some small thing in Racket and enjoy it. The Racket ecosystem is fantastic.

velcrovan 7y ago
See you there!

mruts 7y ago

The only thing that has stopped me from using racket more are the performance issues. Hopefully Racket-CS will make racket competitive performance-wise with CL. In regards to expressiveness, Racket is definately the most powerful lisp on the market, maybe even of any language, lisp or not. Great GUI library, the most powerful metaprogramming the world has ever seen, FP, static typing (still a little rough around the edges), libraries for xml/json/http and a ton of other stuff, nice OOP libraries, contracts, and a truly awesome IDE. Is there any other language that is as flexible, powerful, and elegant? The only thing missing from the equation is a high performance optimizing compiler and industrial GC. If Racket could get JVM-like performance and a GC that could manage terabytes of heap, it would be the ideal language for me. I used to program Racket professionally in academia, and it works really well for desktop applications. You can whip up complex single user apps very very quickly, with generally acceptable performance. Great for research and data science applications. I now use Scala at work on a computation heavy multi-user finance application and Racket would be unteniable for this use case. High-load servers need the best GC (or no GC) and there are very few languages that work well in this use case. Pretty much just JVM languages, C/C++, Rust, and maybe Go or OCaml. If Racket could get competitive in these areas, it might open the door for commercial adoption. Though, on the otherhand, both Python and Ruby have worse implementations and worse GC and that doesn’t stop everyone from using them for servers. This is a tangent I suppose, but it’s a mystery to me why Racket isn’t more popular compared to Ruby/Python. For data science and ML the network effects of Python are strong, but the networking libraries for Python aren’t any better than those for Racket. Maybe people just think parens are scary? Anyways, Racket is seriously awesome and developed by some great people (professors). If you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend it. Very easy to get started because of the great IDE. PS: Also HN is written in Racket (essentially), so I guess you can wrangle for high-load servers.

jambutters 7y ago
always wondered so too. Racket also seems to beat python in many benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/faster/racket-python3.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... , but yeah, i guess people just hate parens and prefix notation.
7y ago

default-kramer 7y ago

I found the Featured Paper this issue to be very approachable - only 13 pages including code and not excessively academic: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-automata-macros/paper.pdf https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-au...

chriswarbo 7y ago

The video DSL looks like quite a nice idea. I could see myself using it to keep videos in git: add all the raw source clips once as immutable blobs, then do all of the editing with text. (The same could be done with shell scripts and ffmpeg, but urgh). I wonder how it fits with the ideas of FRAN (functional reactive animation)?