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I've done way more Clojure than any other Lisp, and I'm now transitioning to Racket. Primarily, because I want to get away from the JVM. One thing about Clojure

by dmos62 7y ago

I've done way more Clojure than any other Lisp, and I'm now transitioning to Racket. Primarily, because I want to get away from the JVM. One thing about Clojure that is not easy to put into words, and that I miss, is just how "smooth" working on it is. The Clojurisms, as they come to be known, are very well thought out, and the whole language fits together like a perfect puzzle, or at least in my experience. To come back to the JVM thing, I find that Clojure is applicable only serverside, where you can have the slow starting hundreds-of-megabytes JVM running non-stop, or in the browser, through ClojureScript, and it's really perfect for those environments. Though as I shifted more towards non-server environments, and I need to use FFIs, Racket is the right blend of expression and performance.

dorfsmay 7y ago
Have you played with the different schemes or just jumped on racket? If the former, I'd be interested to know why racket over gambit or chicken?
- dmos62 7y ago
  No, Racket is my first Scheme.
hencq 7y ago
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I mainly used Clojure, but have been doing more Racket lately. Mainly for short scripts, because it doesn't have the warm-up time of Clojure. Racket is a beautiful language, but some things in Clojure are just opinionated in a very nice way. For example, the seq abstraction and the fact that most sequences and functions are lazy by default is really nice. It also makes more use of polymorphism, so you can e.g. call map on a hash-map, a vector or a lazy seq. Also the fact that maps and keywords act like functions is extremely convenient. Similarly, let is actually let* and binding forms allow destructuring. Racket has all this, but you have to remember to use e.g. match. Racket macros are a work of art and I'm only just exploring them. However, the surface area is very large. In Clojure once you know the language and some of the standard library you can write macros. In Racket it seems there's a whole other language you have to learn. It's clear though that they're extremely powerful, so I probably just need to invest more time in it. All in all my ideal language would be Racket with some of the conveniences and choices of Clojure. Gerbil is another lisp that looks interesting; maybe I'd steal some stuff from there too. Of course, Racket is extremely well suited to building languages, so I could actually build this ideal language if I wanted (and had the time and skill required).
michaelmrose 7y ago
Have you checked out the new aot compiler that can produce 10-20mb images that start about as fast as c applications? https://www.graalvm.org https://www.graalvm.org

by dmos62 7y ago

dorfsmay 7y ago

Have you played with the different schemes or just jumped on racket? If the former, I'd be interested to know why racket over gambit or chicken?

dmos62 7y ago
No, Racket is my first Scheme.

hencq 7y ago

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I mainly used Clojure, but have been doing more Racket lately. Mainly for short scripts, because it doesn't have the warm-up time of Clojure. Racket is a beautiful language, but some things in Clojure are just opinionated in a very nice way. For example, the seq abstraction and the fact that most sequences and functions are lazy by default is really nice. It also makes more use of polymorphism, so you can e.g. call map on a hash-map, a vector or a lazy seq. Also the fact that maps and keywords act like functions is extremely convenient. Similarly, let is actually let* and binding forms allow destructuring. Racket has all this, but you have to remember to use e.g. match. Racket macros are a work of art and I'm only just exploring them. However, the surface area is very large. In Clojure once you know the language and some of the standard library you can write macros. In Racket it seems there's a whole other language you have to learn. It's clear though that they're extremely powerful, so I probably just need to invest more time in it. All in all my ideal language would be Racket with some of the conveniences and choices of Clojure. Gerbil is another lisp that looks interesting; maybe I'd steal some stuff from there too. Of course, Racket is extremely well suited to building languages, so I could actually build this ideal language if I wanted (and had the time and skill required).

michaelmrose 7y ago

Have you checked out the new aot compiler that can produce 10-20mb images that start about as fast as c applications? https://www.graalvm.org https://www.graalvm.org