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Racket, what an odd part of my life. After learning QBASIC and then quickly pivoting to Python thanks to the advice of my peers on 711chan IRC, I read ESR's "H
by jesushax 4y ago
Racket, what an odd part of my life.
After learning QBASIC and then quickly pivoting to Python thanks to the advice of my peers on 711chan IRC, I read ESR's "How to become a hacker" which lauded Lisp as this magical language that will forever change the way you think. Wow, powerful stuff for a teenager to hear. I want to have elevated, magical thinking. So I downloaded DrRacket.
Years later, after a few years that were the beginning of a career in software, I was in jail. I took some math classes where they gave us programmable calculators. I was fucking enthralled to be able to code again. I used TI-BASIC to make a little lisp interpreter, which I called Prison Lisp.
So many games, all the glee of a child in gradeschool (which is comparable to incarceration in many other ways). The people in my pod (shared living dormitory type thing) all asked to play the games, it was like having a gameboy.
Out again, mid twenties, start to code again. Somehow, a few years with no computers hadn't affected my ability to code in the least. I was actually much better than before. I start competing for gigs on Upwork, supporting myself pretty comfortably. I get married, start a family.
My wife loves coding challenges, but has no professional ambitions in tech. So I show her Racket, she loves it. My daughter is curious and wants a different lisp, so I show her Clojure. She hates it, sticks with Python. No judgement, I'm a lifelong Pythonista at this point.
I think back, to a friend from that 711chan IRC chat. He was learning Perl and I had recommended he try out something else, taught him a bit of Racket. I Googled him a year or so ago, turns out he ended up making several contributions to the Racket source code, and is a big shot electrical engineer. Good for him.
Life is so beautiful and strange.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoWhat a wild ride of a post - thanks for sharing!
- bitwize 4y agoThat's the second-coolest prison story I've ever heard. (The coolest involved the narrator meeting a guy in the joint, who took Dragon Ball Z very, very seriously, and taught martial arts classes for his fellow inmates based on the Saiyan moves from the show, which turned out to actually be pretty serviceable self-defense techniques.)
- kamaal 4y agoThere is also this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494065
- sph 4y agoYou can't mention that DBZ story without a link.
- bitwize 4y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/weeabootales/comments/802te4/prison_weeaboo_outbreak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/weeabootales/comments/802te4/prison...
- donthellbanme 4y agoYou have a book in you.
- d0mine 4y agoIf it is not gpt-generated, it is a rather remarkable experience worth elaborating on.
- exdsq 4y agoIf this was gpt-generated, this is what you'd get - same first line but altered to focus on the programming language and not the sports equipment. """ I was first introduced to Racket in college. It was the language of choice for a class on functional programming. I was immediately taken aback by the strange syntax and even stranger function names. But, I was also intrigued by the possibilities of functional programming and the expressiveness of the language. I spent the next few years dabbling in Racket, picking up new tricks and learning more about functional programming. I even wrote a few small programs in Racket, but nothing too serious. And then I got a job as a software engineer. At my job, I use Racket every day. It is the language we use for all of our backend services. And, over the past year, I have come to appreciate Racket in a whole new way. Racket is a strange language, but it is also a powerful language. It has a unique syntax that can take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it is actually quite expressive. And, the functional programming paradigm is incredibly powerful for writing robust and correct code. I am still learning new things about Racket every day, and I am sure I will continue to do so for years to come. Racket is a language that is worth learning, and I am glad I made the effort to do so. """
- idle_zealot 4y agoThe generated text is indistinguishable (to me) from a normal, if somewhat bland, toplevel HN comment on a Racket thread.
- lenkite 4y agoWhy did your daughter hate Clojure ? Was it the language or the tools/ecosystem? (Curious on what beginners find difficult)
- Hammershaft 4y agoAs someone who is not a beginner the feedback on errors / stack traces is absolutely miserable, some of the worst of any high level language I've used. This is doubly true for clojurescript.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- capableweb 4y agoYeah, this is true. Lots of people start using Clojure without knowing the underlying hosts (the JVM for Clojure, JavaScript for ClojureScript) which I also did, with zero experience of the JVM before I learned Clojure, and it can get very daunting very quickly the first times you come across endless JVM stack traces. Fortunately when I started to use ClojureScript, I was already deep into the JavaScript ecosystem, so those stack traces were not a problem, and by now the JVM ones no longer scare me. Practice makes perfect, but without previous experience in the host languages, it's completely understandable that the stack traces are a huge turnoff.
- no_wizard 4y agoClojure runs in the CLR too https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr
- capableweb 4y agoAnd even more languages than that! Erlang, Dart, and a couple more are some that I've come across recently. And my point is valid for all of those language, if you don't know the host, the errors/exceptions coming from using Clojure in those languages will confuse you initially, no matter how well you know Clojure itself.
- nekomorphism 4y agoThank you for sharing! Glad to hear things worked out for you!