10 ms·
Racket 8.1
- yewenjie 5y agoI think Racket is the only modern lisp which has a sufficiently large community. What, if any, do you think should be the flagship project for introducing Racket?
- wa1987 5y agoThere's Clojure too.
- dermal 5y agoThere are some very valid reasons [1] why we should stay away from Racket: toxic community, toxic people... And come on: no one has ever really used Racket to write some decent nontrivial web application, documentation is awful (and, please, don't count HN here, cause HN is written in Arc). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wY7FBtr7_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wY7FBtr7_c
- GavinMcG 5y agoRacket's documentation isn't something I've ever heard criticized. It's extensive, well-written, and even has various formats for users at different levels of familiarity. I don't think I've run into another language whose documentation gave me as much confidence.
- borodi 5y agoI would say that racket has one of the best tutorials ever made for any language. Specially with the reduced versions inside DrRacket. Also some books like How to Design Programs.
- baldfat 5y agoHow to Design Programs is maybe my all time favorite programming book. BUT it is incredibly dense and you can't go to it for your first book. Realms of Racket is a good one though.
- dermal 5y agoOk, GavinMcG, just try to write web application in racket, based on official documentation. I assure you that nothing will be clear to you, huge questions will just fly over your head, and if you then ask for help on the Racket group, the people there will make fun of you. Been there, done that! Believe me.
- nickpeterson 5y agoI watched this video (skimmed), it seems like the creator had a few incidents involving people in the racket community. I’m not a racket community participant or racket user, but every community has these issues. Honestly this feels like a really weird ax to grind against racket?
- lukego 5y agoHe's talking in measured terms about his own personal experience on his own personal vlog. It was probably cathartic for him (and for other people too.) No big deal.
- GavinMcG 5y agoI watched the whole video. He acknowledged that Racket has excellent documentation, a wide-ranging toolset, etc. All the good stuff you've heard elsewhere. He criticizes the language-oriented model (in comparison to languages that people are familiar with but that allow embedded Deals, like Lua or Ruby) because creating a new DSL is antithetical to code that communicates with other programmers. This is fair, and a common criticism of Lisps: the complete freedom of the macro system means that individual programmers can create their own dialects quite easily, and other users of that code have a harder time working with it than in languages where there's not as much metaprogramming. On the "toxic" front, one of the core team apparently asked a waitress a cringy question about higher education, referred to some other educators (at the creator's institution) as doofuses and the like, and was arrogant. And at the end of it all, though he doesn't see a use for Racket's language-oriented model, he recommends learning and using it.
- protomyth 5y agobecause creating a new DSL is antithetical to code that communicates with other programmers. DSLs communicate wonderfully with the business users paying for the program. It also allows a programmer to match the jargon / industry speak used by the users.
- Bootvis 5y agoDo you have an example of such a DSL? I like the idea but I myself can’t come up with a tool that implements it well.
- blacktriangle 5y agoNot Racked based, but I'd say Cucumber/Gherkin. Yes it is absolutely overkill for small teams, but if you have a dedicated person who is not really a programmer but who is managing requirements between the developers and the stakeholders, Cucumber is amazing in that scenario.
- hashkb 5y agoRails routes. ActiveRecord. RSpec
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tdsamardzhiev 5y agoI remember a time when people could take being called a "doofus" without starting a smear campaign.
- notriskfree 5y agoYou doofus.
- rscho 5y agoHey, you're improving! You actually modified your spiel instead of only copy/pasting the last iteration of your smear campaign like last time. Way to go :D PS : what happened to the "you can't make a web app in Racket" part?
- ashton314 5y agoLol. Who is this person you’re replying to, and can we get them banned for being a troll? I really don’t know what this guy’s talking about in other comments. Web apps seem super easy to put together in Racket. For those curious, see: https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/index.html (The troll also acknowledges that Arc is a neat language— apparently, they think that racket is a terrible language to write bad applications, but I guess it’s good enough to write a language to write good web applications in!) (I have heard a Racket described as the “second best programming language, the best programming language is the one you use Racket to build!)
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop creating accounts to post like this? I realize you have some strong opinions about Racket. I have no doubt that there is some truth in there. But what you're doing here is absolutely not what this forum is supposed to be for, and you're hurting it. If you would please stop, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- forgotpwd16 5y agoInterestingly you're writing this on a forum which runs on (or used to run?) on Racket. HN was written in Arc[0] which was implemented atop Racket[1]. And that's a good example case of using Racket as it is proponent of language-oriented programming[2]. [0]: http://arclanguage.org http://arclanguage.org [1]: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install [2]: https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html
- dermal 5y agoYes, this forum was implemented in Arc, atop of Racket. But the reason for that is because Arc is great, not Racket.
- forgotpwd16 5y agoWriting a domain-specific language on Racket is kinda Racket's main selling point. If you don't trust me, you can trust the people who made Arc and HN. Afterall back in 2007 you had other options. Some of them vastly popular even now (Rails, Django, PHP, Scala, ...).
- baldfat 5y agoI don't think HN News uses Arc anymore. Also Arc is just a language written with racket. Racket is a language for making languages.
- polytely 5y agoI'm not really a racket user (more of an admirer) but every time I see an online book created in Pollen it looks amazing. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
- alessivs 5y agoPollen is just a very extensible and composable slate for you to compose content. Under the hood, Pollen may be equivalent to the Scribble language without the fixed export structures and styles. That the outputs look very good may be correlated with the author and other prominent users caring for typography and web delivery. As-is, my impression is that generation of multiple pages seems slower than scribble/manual, but the community has been exploring use of databases to speed up caches. In this respect, I've been eyeing the work of this member in particular: https://github.com/otherjoel https://github.com/otherjoel All this speaks very good of the seemingly limitless flexibility of the Racket ecosystem.
- rataata_jr 5y agoI really like Guile
- Decabytes 5y agoChristopher Lemmer Webber has some really great talks about Racket and Guile. Guile certainly does a lot better on the interactive programming front
- bjoli 5y agoSo do I. However, whenever I think of changes I would like to do to guile I end up with a language a lot closer to racket... Immutable pairs, immutable hash tables, immutable strings (which racket has not), user extensible pattern matching and a proper looping facility (preferrablymore powerful than rackets). Add to that some better facilities for mixing languages and it is a very nice language that is very close to racket. Yet for some reason I find guile more fun.
- gus_massa 5y agoNitpicking: > immutable strings (which racket has not) The reader makes strings in the sour code immutable by default. And if you have a mutable string you can use string->immutable-string https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/strings.html#%28def._%28%28quote._~23~25kernel%29._string-~3eimmutable-string%29%29 https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/strings.html#%28def._...
- bjoli 5y agoYeah. I should have been more clear. I meant as the default. There are all kinds of nice optimizations that can be done with immutable strings compared to mutable ones. Which I probably don't have to tell you, Gustavo :) I have been reading every patch you have made to chez, not understanding half of it but loving every moment.
- spdegabrielle 5y agoSo many things have been made in Racket you would have specify the sort of thing you were after. Maybe web services? https://youtu.be/ZvwE6_MMJjM https://youtu.be/ZvwE6_MMJjM
- jnxx 5y agoI think both Clojure and Common Lisp are modern lisps too, both have large user communities. Common Lisp is mostly different in that it is much more agnostic than Scheme, for example it as no constraints in using imperative patterns. On the other hand, it also has acquired libraries for purely functional data types, which is one of the main innovations of Clojure.
- forgotpwd16 5y agoIf anyone missed it, Racket has finally (it has been planned and worked for few years now) moved by default to Chez Scheme (ie Racket CS) on v8.0 (Feb 2021) which has improved in most cases performance.
- dermal 5y agoYes, and now, after three year and countless hour spent the new version (RacketCS) is running slower than the old one! Congratulations to Racket development team - well done! :)
- forgotpwd16 5y agoBenchmarks beg to differ: https://blog.racket-lang.org/2021/01/racket-status.html https://blog.racket-lang.org/2021/01/racket-status.html. But those may be (being the official ones) biased, so a third-party running them will be nice. Also performance wasn't the only reason. Maintainability and easier development were as well, which for language like Racket, I believe, are more important.
- gus_massa 5y agoI agree. IIRC the benchmarks is the union of few benchmarks sets that were floating around, like some usual benchmarks for Scheme implementations [1] and old versions of the The Computer Language Benchmarks Game [2] In particular you can see the comparison of "Racket" (aka Racket CS) and "Racket BC" with the current version of the The Computer Language Benchmarks Game in https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/racket-racketbc.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... (The set of problems and measurements of runtime are made by someone that is not in the Racket team.) [1] That are somewhat bad for Racket because some of them use mutable pairs/cons. [2] They are frozen to test backward compatibility and to ensure any progress is due to improvements in the compiler.
- samth 5y agogus_massa knows this, but building Racket from source (which is basically just running a lot of Racket code) is now faster with Racket CS than with Racket BC.
- vascocosta 5y agoAs an imperative, stateful and even sometimes OOP developer, always finding functional programming very elegant but never really using it for real, Racket was the Lisp dialect that finally hooked me in. I think the reason was because it came with batteries included and I could create complex applications using only the standard library or very few packages.
- hiq 5y agoWhat do you use it for?
- vascocosta 5y agoComplex applications was probably an overstatement but I've created featureful IRC and Discord bots, a database management application and right now I'm creating a graphical browser for the Gemini protocol. All my other previous attempts at using functional languages, like for instance Haskell, ended up in trivial applications, usually based in numerical analysis.
- Y_Y 5y agoI'd be interested to see this Gemini browser in Racket. Do you have a public repo?
- vascocosta 5y agoIt's in a very early stage, because I'm porting it from a previous Python code base, so it's not yet available. That said, I'll leave here two links for Racket software that inspire me. 1. Gemini server with tons of features, that I use personally: https://sr.ht/~rwv/dezhemini/ https://sr.ht/~rwv/dezhemini/ 2. Graphical Gopher browser: https://github.com/erkin/gophwr https://github.com/erkin/gophwr
- gus_massa 5y agoMy latest project was: Get some emails using IMAP, login to my site, find and scrap some data related to the sender of the email, and send a reply using SMTP. The logic is not very complicated, it uses 4 or 5 of the standard libraries and I avoid writing a hundred emails per day.
- imiric 5y agoI've been keeping an eye on Racket for a few years now, and recently gave their documentation tool Scribble[1] a try, as an alternative to writing LaTeX directly. But honestly I found the experience difficult if you need some custom behavior, and falling back to Racket was very confusing as a relative newcomer to Lisp (with mostly Elisp experience). It doesn't help that their documentation, while detailed, is not very beginner friendly. So I went back to org-mode for exporting to PDF via LaTeX. Congrats on the release! [1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/
- retzkek 5y agoPollen [1] is pretty neat, it's amazing what Matthew Butterick has done with it to create his books. Beautiful Racket [2] truly is beautiful and inspiring. [1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ [2]: https://beautifulracket.com/ https://beautifulracket.com/
- imiric 5y agoYou're not kidding, that's probably the most beautiful book in HTML I've ever seen. The typography is gorgeous, the navigation is intuitive and easy to use, downloadable code samples, links for every paragraph with a feedback form (!), and the writing style is clear and approachable. It's definitely on my to-read list. Thanks for sharing!
- zelphirkalt 5y agoI gave up creating anything with scribble or pollen, not sure which one it was, when I had the nagging urge to change the font and could not figure out how to do that. Composing different parts of the document was OK, but I simply could not find anything about changing the font. I am sure, if I had asked, I would have gotten an answer, but in that moment, it killed my motivation to get into it further.
- velcrovan 5y agoProbably Scribble, which is pretty opinionated. Pollen basically gives you tools to design your own markup and makes no assumptions about the published result.
- tym0 5y agoIs there good library support for typed-racket?
- rscho 5y agoYou can use any Racket lib, with the caveat that importing from an untyped lib requires the user to state the type.
- tym0 5y agoSo it doesn't infer types for libraries not marked as `#lang typed/racket`? You need to write your own types like you would using a Javascript library from Typescript? Edit: Found the relevant part of the docs[1], I like the automatic contract enforcement, although I guess it would be kinda hard to guess the perf impact... [1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/typed-untyped-interaction.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/typed-untyped-interact...
- xfer 5y agoYes typed racket works the same as typescript. But it's an earlier work. Typescript probably took inspirations from it along with others. Typed-racket has some form of refinement types now as well.
- bjoli 5y agoWith the caveat that typed racket does not have any unsound corners of the type system, not even for comfort.
- stewbrew 5y agoIs there a demo for a racket app on Android?
- barrenko 5y agoGot a couple of questions - what's that IDE like, and how's Racket compared to Clojure? I'm a newb to the paradigm, but fiding it useful to understand Javascript better. Thanks.
- gus_massa 5y agoHere is an screenshot of the IDE and more info https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/interface-essentials.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/interface-essentials.h... It includes syntax highlight (that is difficult because you can add your own syntax), online help, debugging, debugging of macros (that are the way to add your own syntax).
- iamevn 5y agoIt's not the most advanced IDE but it's good enough that I almost always use it when writing in Racket. Pretty much everything in the editor is set up so that languages implemented in Racket automatically get to take advantage of it which is really cool. The repl is about on par with readline but with fancier output. Stuff like images and what racket calls "snips" are directly displayed in the repl. Snips implement their own rendering and interaction handling so you can do stuff like animation, plot charts, display an interactive map, etc. What I feel like it's missing is a way to collapse output/results like the console in firefox/chrome does and a way to reference the previous results (beyond just hitting the ctrl+up keybind) like in ipython. There's a solid debugger and a tool to show each step of macro expansion if you need that while writing macros. Package manager is integrated into the editor. Autocomplete, syntax highlighting, auto indent/reinvent are all present and are fine. It's got a bunch of little nice things like when you mouse over an identifier it draws an arrow to the where it was bound or required from a module. The reverse works too so you mouse over a binding/require and get arrows showing all the occurences. Another little thing is that it will automatically input the correct closing paren depending on context so if you're typing "(foo [bar (baz" and you then type ")" three times it'll input ")])".
- jnxx 5y agoWhat I find very nice with the IDE is that it can directly display images as function results. That's useful for teaching but I think it might also be very handy for data visualization and symbolic representations. Perhaps even for debugging with complex data structures. I think this is a mayor innovation.
- smnrchrds 5y agoFor me, Racket will always be the language used to create the best programming pun of all times: > Write your next Ethereum Contract in Pyramid Scheme > I create Pyramid: A dialect of the Scheme programming language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM). Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket. http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethereum-contract-in-pyramid-scheme.html http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethere...
- captaincaveman 5y agoNicely done sir!
- smnrchrds 5y agoJust to clarify, it's not my project.
- Decabytes 5y agoWhile I don't work with Racket much now, I will be eternally grateful for the concepts it taught, functional programming, recursion through the little schemer, how to design programs and break them up into small chunks, and writing tests. Gradual typing allowed me to make my programs more robust, and the type checking built into typed Racket helped catch errors without having to run a separate utility like mypy. The community isn't the largest, but you can still get an answer to the questions that you have, and having a GUI built in the standard library (which is rare amongst Schemes) allowed me to do some pretty cool things like implement Conways game of life https://gitlab.com/diegocrespo/conways-game-of-life/-/tree/master https://gitlab.com/diegocrespo/conways-game-of-life/-/tree/m....