4 ms·
Racket positions itself mainly as an education and research platform. Yes, this is what puts food on the table of academics. I don't understand your criticism.
by rscho 6y ago
Racket positions itself mainly as an education and research platform. Yes, this is what puts food on the table of academics. I don't understand your criticism. Racket is very impressive in many ways, but making a run-of-the-mill webapp in two lines is not one of them.
IMO, thinking that nothing important came out of Racket reseachwise is a highly uninformed opinion. I mean, dependent type systems as macros (therefore bringing true static types as a library)! Come on, is that not impressive?! Rewriting Scheme-on-Scheme to obtain something simpler and pretty much as fast as Scheme-on-C is not impressive!? A Scheme program that compiles to a C parallel GC is not impressive!?
On the contrary, the core Racket team is very, very impressive. Just not for the things you yourself wish for.
- fern2000 6y agoYes, I'm aware that Racket is mainly education and research platform; that's exactly what I said in my previous post. Racket is not well-suited for practical web-programming. Proof: For Python or Ruby, there are dozens of books explaining how to write web applications in them. But there's not a single good book for Racket (not just for web programming, but for anything). Racket's authors use racket for their academic jerk-offs, but don't fog our eyes and tell us it's a practical language for real programmers, when it isn't.
- rscho 6y agoI'm sorry, but it's like complaining that Haskell is not a practical language. If you want to do production work, then why not focus on languages that are geared towards that? There are a lot of choices out there...
- zelphirkalt 6y agoHuh? Weird, I have written a blog website in what Racket offers, following the documentation you criticize in another comment and got it working. Even the not so easy to understand continuation based side of it came to me after reading it thoroughly. It is quite simple to setup your REST routes and all that. If you are interested, you may refer to: https://github.com/ZelphirKaltstahl/racket-markdown-blog/tree/master/blog https://github.com/ZelphirKaltstahl/racket-markdown-blog/tre... I did never bring it online, as I never rented a server for it, but it definitely functions and I had some local posts, which I did not include in the repository. Did you never have a software without documentation? I think that would be way worse than having a sort of OK documentation of a bare bones web framework, that is actually understandable, with careful reading. The Racket mailing list is also very helpful and people there are helpful in my experience. Show them you tried and your attempt at things and they'll probably help you out. My only pain with it is, that they are on Google groups.