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I 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 Racke
by yewenjie 5y ago
I 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.