4 ms·

What is the purpose of Racket? Is there any use for web development?

molteanu 7y ago
What is the use of a computer? Can you play games with it?
creatornator 7y ago
Racket is often used in academic circles (my University uses it to teach the fundamental CS courses), and also to prototype other programming languages, like a programming-language-language. It has good capabilities for building parsers, grammars, traversing ASTs, and code generation.
cultus 7y ago
I've heard of people using it for backend. Moreso than even most lisps, Racket is incredibly powerful. It's really good at building DSLs, since the code is just another data type with the macro system. For the frontend, there's Clojurejs.
cpach 7y ago
When learning to program, Racket was immensely useful to me. The concepts behind Lisp are simple, so I found Lisp to be a good language family to study in order to grasp how programming languages work. These days I prefer Python though.
laszlokorte 7y ago
hackernews is built on top of racket
- lkirk 7y ago
  I thought that it was implemented in Arc: http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Arc is a racket dialect
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      Arc is an a lisp dialect that's been implemented in racket.
      - neilv 7y ago
        That's my understanding. Early on, I started doing an incomplete implementation of Arc more like what one of the parent comments suggested, and the working title was "morc: Mock Arc Programming Language as Scheme Extension". I just wanted to learn Arc, while learning Scheme macros better. Besides possibly adding to the confusion over the relationship between Arc and Racket (or PLT Scheme), my poor choice of title caused at least one community member to be upset, that I would mock (insult) Arc. When I meant only to be self-deprecating of my own exercise, like a poor-imitation or approximation, and not to seem to presume to be implementing a full Arc this way.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Many have made the statement "Racket is the best Lisp/Scheme". Many have made the statement "Lisp/Scheme is the best programming language ever!"
- molteanu 7y ago
  Those are some fine people.
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  the interesting thing is that racket has evolved far beyond lisp and scheme.
JoelMcCracken 7y ago
I recently rebuilt my personal website on a Racket project: https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/ https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/ My post about why I chose it: https://joelmccracken.com/entries/pollen-writing-semantic-markup.html https://joelmccracken.com/entries/pollen-writing-semantic-ma... A really good resource for understanding the motivation behind racket: https://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/ https://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/ For a taste of the build code I wrote: https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/master/src/build.rkt https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast... and https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/master/src/pollen.rkt https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast...
tosh 7y ago
I'd say Racket is a general purpose multi-paradigm language that is well designed. Good for use cases where you otherwise might find code written in JavaScript, Python, Clojure or Ruby. You can do web development with Racket https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ One thing that makes Racket somewhat special is that it can be used to build your own languages (e.g. domain specific languages) with it as it comes with the tools and a community that has experience in it. https://beautifulracket.com/ https://beautifulracket.com/ There also is a great introduction to programming online course with Racket by Gregor Kiczales https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > There also is a great introduction to programming online course with Racket by Gregor Kiczales https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x Probably anyone who would be interested knows it without its needing to be pointed out, but I mention in case it entices anyone that Gregor Kiczales is one of the authors of "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol" (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczales/dp/0262610744 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczal... ; edited to remove abbreviation).
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    > The art of the MOP Please, what does that mean? I program in Racket, and have enjoyed the vidoes but googling this phrase suggests either Prof Kiczales likes to clean floors in an innovative way, or else he is a member of Hip-Hop group. I'm not finding either terribly credible.
    - sea6ear 7y ago
      He is the author of the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
seisvelas 7y ago
Racket is great for web development, but it really shines for creating other programming languages.
- neilv 7y ago
  Racket is great for some kinds of Web development right now. (Maybe more later, with the development of additional toolkits, and/or maybe a WASM backend after the Chez work.) I've personally worked on a few industry Web "full-stack" projects in Racket -- including an important large server-heavy system that accomplished something on AWS that no one had yet done before, and a very complex data model HTML5 Offline app (which I did as a mixture of generated and Web services) -- that would not have been possible any other way with the developer resources available. I also used Racket for smaller Web tasks, as a researcher, to whip up a browser-based labeling UI for a large corpus (the corpus was also Web-scraped and massaged by Racket), and to save a big conference demo when the big Java server someone had made could not be deployed on the two-laptop LAN that would be available. But if a bunch of people hear "Racket is great for Web development" without being more specific, they will run to go look at it, then they will be confused, then they will run at you with pitchforks. Racket is potentially great for a startup doing a non-cookie-cutter MVP for which they'll have to be clever and invent some things in any case. But Racket is not going to be some variation on some currently-popular framework you already know (maybe it can be backend for one of the frontend frameworks), and you're going to have to write some code to do exactly what you want, not just glue together off-the-shelf components.
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    I wrote a full feature search engine and web crawler in Racket and it had everything I wanted off the shelf; I was really wowed by how batteries included it was for web development. This was in 2013. It's definitely easier than Node, in my opinion.

What is the use of a computer? Can you play games with it?

Racket is often used in academic circles (my University uses it to teach the fundamental CS courses), and also to prototype other programming languages, like a programming-language-language. It has good capabilities for building parsers, grammars, traversing ASTs, and code generation.

cultus 7y ago

I've heard of people using it for backend. Moreso than even most lisps, Racket is incredibly powerful. It's really good at building DSLs, since the code is just another data type with the macro system. For the frontend, there's Clojurejs.

cpach 7y ago

When learning to program, Racket was immensely useful to me. The concepts behind Lisp are simple, so I found Lisp to be a good language family to study in order to grasp how programming languages work. These days I prefer Python though.

laszlokorte 7y ago

hackernews is built on top of racket

lkirk 7y ago
I thought that it was implemented in Arc: http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Arc is a racket dialect
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    Arc is an a lisp dialect that's been implemented in racket.
    - neilv 7y ago
      That's my understanding. Early on, I started doing an incomplete implementation of Arc more like what one of the parent comments suggested, and the working title was "morc: Mock Arc Programming Language as Scheme Extension". I just wanted to learn Arc, while learning Scheme macros better. Besides possibly adding to the confusion over the relationship between Arc and Racket (or PLT Scheme), my poor choice of title caused at least one community member to be upset, that I would mock (insult) Arc. When I meant only to be self-deprecating of my own exercise, like a poor-imitation or approximation, and not to seem to presume to be implementing a full Arc this way.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Many have made the statement "Racket is the best Lisp/Scheme". Many have made the statement "Lisp/Scheme is the best programming language ever!"

molteanu 7y ago
Those are some fine people.
nikofeyn 7y ago
the interesting thing is that racket has evolved far beyond lisp and scheme.

JoelMcCracken 7y ago

I recently rebuilt my personal website on a Racket project: https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/ https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/ My post about why I chose it: https://joelmccracken.com/entries/pollen-writing-semantic-markup.html https://joelmccracken.com/entries/pollen-writing-semantic-ma... A really good resource for understanding the motivation behind racket: https://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/ https://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/ For a taste of the build code I wrote: https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/master/src/build.rkt https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast... and https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/master/src/pollen.rkt https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast...

tosh 7y ago

I'd say Racket is a general purpose multi-paradigm language that is well designed. Good for use cases where you otherwise might find code written in JavaScript, Python, Clojure or Ruby. You can do web development with Racket https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ One thing that makes Racket somewhat special is that it can be used to build your own languages (e.g. domain specific languages) with it as it comes with the tools and a community that has experience in it. https://beautifulracket.com/ https://beautifulracket.com/ There also is a great introduction to programming online course with Racket by Gregor Kiczales https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x

JadeNB 7y ago
> There also is a great introduction to programming online course with Racket by Gregor Kiczales https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x Probably anyone who would be interested knows it without its needing to be pointed out, but I mention in case it entices anyone that Gregor Kiczales is one of the authors of "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol" (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczales/dp/0262610744 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczal... ; edited to remove abbreviation).
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  > The art of the MOP Please, what does that mean? I program in Racket, and have enjoyed the vidoes but googling this phrase suggests either Prof Kiczales likes to clean floors in an innovative way, or else he is a member of Hip-Hop group. I'm not finding either terribly credible.
  - sea6ear 7y ago
    He is the author of the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

seisvelas 7y ago

Racket is great for web development, but it really shines for creating other programming languages.

neilv 7y ago
Racket is great for some kinds of Web development right now. (Maybe more later, with the development of additional toolkits, and/or maybe a WASM backend after the Chez work.) I've personally worked on a few industry Web "full-stack" projects in Racket -- including an important large server-heavy system that accomplished something on AWS that no one had yet done before, and a very complex data model HTML5 Offline app (which I did as a mixture of generated and Web services) -- that would not have been possible any other way with the developer resources available. I also used Racket for smaller Web tasks, as a researcher, to whip up a browser-based labeling UI for a large corpus (the corpus was also Web-scraped and massaged by Racket), and to save a big conference demo when the big Java server someone had made could not be deployed on the two-laptop LAN that would be available. But if a bunch of people hear "Racket is great for Web development" without being more specific, they will run to go look at it, then they will be confused, then they will run at you with pitchforks. Racket is potentially great for a startup doing a non-cookie-cutter MVP for which they'll have to be clever and invent some things in any case. But Racket is not going to be some variation on some currently-popular framework you already know (maybe it can be backend for one of the frontend frameworks), and you're going to have to write some code to do exactly what you want, not just glue together off-the-shelf components.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  I wrote a full feature search engine and web crawler in Racket and it had everything I wanted off the shelf; I was really wowed by how batteries included it was for web development. This was in 2013. It's definitely easier than Node, in my opinion.