6 ms·

Show HN: Metapict – TikZ like figures using Racket

71 points by soegaard 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
soegaard 4y ago
The "blog" consists of detailed examples of how to draw 2d figures using Metapict. Metapict is what I imagine Metapost and Tikz would have looked like, if they were written in Racket.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
college_physics 4y ago
Remarkable that you can replicate tikz with what looks like more concise and readable code (i say "looks like" cause i have no experience with parenthesis-loving languages :-) One advantage of tikz though is that you can directlt embed it in latex.
- soegaard 4y ago
  > Remarkable that you can replicate tikz with what looks like more concise and readable code (i say "looks like" cause i have no experience with parenthesis-loving languages :-) Thanks for the compliment. It's not my first Racket macro :-) > One advantage of tikz though is that you can directlt embed it in latex. Its greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.
nixpulvis 4y ago
Sometimes I feel like the biggest "wrong turn" I made in my life was the discontinuation of Racket as my go to language. I never quite made it to the perfect fluency I had in Ruby. And it lacks some of the raw power I feel when I write Rust. Still, perhaps it could be a good time to return. It's hard to maintain perfect fluency in many languages at once, and it's also very valuable to learn multiple languages, so I'm somewhat torn. Just looking at the clarity and brevity of these example drawings brings me back a sense of calm and collectedness I don't often feel anymore.
- neilv 4y ago
  I've noticed a variation on this too, except I stuck with it too long. Scheme (once built out, like Racket and others have done) is easily one of the best languages, on technical merits, but I'm not using it lately, while aware of what I'm missing... Since using Scheme/Racket heavily, I've used three major popular languages, and each has a lot of painful problems, that feel like regressions: * Major Language X was obviously intended for much simpler needs, but kept getting extended to get closer to what was already known from other languages when it was created, the official docs often seem written as if with no awareness of a reader, and a Web search results are mostly maddening SEO by people who don't seem to understand much about the subject matter. * Major Language Y has some merits, but a key DSL seems fundamentally wrong in execution, like a kludge that doesn't reflect what was already known decades ago, and they basically just didn't do documentation yet, and I had to do heroics to work around implementation and design flakiness in a key framework and an important library. * Major Language Z actually shows a lot of positive signs, including cross-pollination in many small details, but at some point there was a breakdown of coherent design for a while, and some poor decisions made, which would be a lot easier to look past were it legacy from much longer ago than it was. That said, Scheme and Racket also have their technical and community drawbacks. Also, more pragmatically, too often lately I've seen hiring situations where they really-really need some engineering magic done... but they're hung up on filtering resumes for ThisYearsPopularFramework2, and believe that's the most important qualification. So, lately, I also use the currently popular tools, even when it's incarnation #23 of something I've seen before (not done as well #4, #5, #7, and #16), and make it work despite/because I'm painfully aware of the weaknesses.
  - jhoechtl 4y ago
    Hm, that may contain Go, Rust and C#?
    - neilv 4y ago
      I suppose it tells us something, when the same criticisms could apply to a lot of language platforms. :) (I was speaking of specific language platforms, but not calling them out by name makes it easier to be candid about the kinds of problems I saw, which was the only point here.)
dang 4y ago
We put Show HN on the title because the submitter is the author of this (cool!) project. Related URLs: https://github.com/soegaard/metapict https://github.com/soegaard/metapict - code https://soegaard.github.io/docs/metapict/metapict.html https://soegaard.github.io/docs/metapict/metapict.html - docs
hieronymusN 4y ago
Metapict has come in very handy to generate SVGs for use with my AxiDraw plotter. Love seeing blog posts like this with pro-tips on how to compose the functions. I always learn a lot from practical examples.
hlandau 4y ago
I'd like to get into Racket as a Scheme user, but I have difficulty taking it seriously when its startup times are still so high: $ time racket -e '(display "hello")' hello real 0m0.721s user 0m0.598s sys 0m0.119s This basically rules out using it for command line scripts, which is a major class of uses for me.
- soegaard 4y ago
  That command uses `#lang racket` which means it loads an awful lot of modules. Try an example with `racket/base` instead. $ time racket ~/tmp/bd.rkt hello Times: 0.12s user 0.04s system 94% cpu 0.176 total The file used $ cat ~/tmp/bd.rkt #lang racket/base (displayln "hello") Also use `raco make` to compile your scripts before running them.
  - hlandau 4y ago
    That gets things down to 0.183s, which is certainly an improvement. But Python manages 0.033s and Guile manages 0.022s, neither of which need a precompile step. I feel like Racket needs to spend some time optimising this. My understanding is that Racket has been doing a lot of work on overhauling its interpreter and internals recently, so I'm hopeful this will improve somehow, but it's unclear to me if they're aware of this issue or consider it a problem.
    - soegaard 4y ago
      The compiler was rewritten and now Chez Scheme is used as part of the pipeline from Racket to assembler. With respect to improving the startup time, the low hanging fruit has already been picked. If I understand correctly part of the problem is the number of modules that needs to be loaded from disk at startup. On my computer the first run is slower than subsequent runs due to caching. Maybe an "compile several modules into a single file" approach might improve things - but it's not trivial project.

71 points by soegaard 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

The "blog" consists of detailed examples of how to draw 2d figures using Metapict. Metapict is what I imagine Metapost and Tikz would have looked like, if they were written in Racket.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

college_physics 4y ago

Remarkable that you can replicate tikz with what looks like more concise and readable code (i say "looks like" cause i have no experience with parenthesis-loving languages :-) One advantage of tikz though is that you can directlt embed it in latex.

soegaard 4y ago
> Remarkable that you can replicate tikz with what looks like more concise and readable code (i say "looks like" cause i have no experience with parenthesis-loving languages :-) Thanks for the compliment. It's not my first Racket macro :-) > One advantage of tikz though is that you can directlt embed it in latex. Its greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.

nixpulvis 4y ago

Sometimes I feel like the biggest "wrong turn" I made in my life was the discontinuation of Racket as my go to language. I never quite made it to the perfect fluency I had in Ruby. And it lacks some of the raw power I feel when I write Rust. Still, perhaps it could be a good time to return. It's hard to maintain perfect fluency in many languages at once, and it's also very valuable to learn multiple languages, so I'm somewhat torn. Just looking at the clarity and brevity of these example drawings brings me back a sense of calm and collectedness I don't often feel anymore.

neilv 4y ago
I've noticed a variation on this too, except I stuck with it too long. Scheme (once built out, like Racket and others have done) is easily one of the best languages, on technical merits, but I'm not using it lately, while aware of what I'm missing... Since using Scheme/Racket heavily, I've used three major popular languages, and each has a lot of painful problems, that feel like regressions: * Major Language X was obviously intended for much simpler needs, but kept getting extended to get closer to what was already known from other languages when it was created, the official docs often seem written as if with no awareness of a reader, and a Web search results are mostly maddening SEO by people who don't seem to understand much about the subject matter. * Major Language Y has some merits, but a key DSL seems fundamentally wrong in execution, like a kludge that doesn't reflect what was already known decades ago, and they basically just didn't do documentation yet, and I had to do heroics to work around implementation and design flakiness in a key framework and an important library. * Major Language Z actually shows a lot of positive signs, including cross-pollination in many small details, but at some point there was a breakdown of coherent design for a while, and some poor decisions made, which would be a lot easier to look past were it legacy from much longer ago than it was. That said, Scheme and Racket also have their technical and community drawbacks. Also, more pragmatically, too often lately I've seen hiring situations where they really-really need some engineering magic done... but they're hung up on filtering resumes for ThisYearsPopularFramework2, and believe that's the most important qualification. So, lately, I also use the currently popular tools, even when it's incarnation #23 of something I've seen before (not done as well #4, #5, #7, and #16), and make it work despite/because I'm painfully aware of the weaknesses.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  Hm, that may contain Go, Rust and C#?
  - neilv 4y ago
    I suppose it tells us something, when the same criticisms could apply to a lot of language platforms. :) (I was speaking of specific language platforms, but not calling them out by name makes it easier to be candid about the kinds of problems I saw, which was the only point here.)

dang 4y ago

We put Show HN on the title because the submitter is the author of this (cool!) project. Related URLs: https://github.com/soegaard/metapict https://github.com/soegaard/metapict - code https://soegaard.github.io/docs/metapict/metapict.html https://soegaard.github.io/docs/metapict/metapict.html - docs

hieronymusN 4y ago

Metapict has come in very handy to generate SVGs for use with my AxiDraw plotter. Love seeing blog posts like this with pro-tips on how to compose the functions. I always learn a lot from practical examples.

hlandau 4y ago

I'd like to get into Racket as a Scheme user, but I have difficulty taking it seriously when its startup times are still so high: $ time racket -e '(display "hello")' hello real 0m0.721s user 0m0.598s sys 0m0.119s This basically rules out using it for command line scripts, which is a major class of uses for me.

soegaard 4y ago
That command uses `#lang racket` which means it loads an awful lot of modules. Try an example with `racket/base` instead. $ time racket ~/tmp/bd.rkt hello Times: 0.12s user 0.04s system 94% cpu 0.176 total The file used $ cat ~/tmp/bd.rkt #lang racket/base (displayln "hello") Also use `raco make` to compile your scripts before running them.
- hlandau 4y ago
  That gets things down to 0.183s, which is certainly an improvement. But Python manages 0.033s and Guile manages 0.022s, neither of which need a precompile step. I feel like Racket needs to spend some time optimising this. My understanding is that Racket has been doing a lot of work on overhauling its interpreter and internals recently, so I'm hopeful this will improve somehow, but it's unclear to me if they're aware of this issue or consider it a problem.
  - soegaard 4y ago
    The compiler was rewritten and now Chez Scheme is used as part of the pipeline from Racket to assembler. With respect to improving the startup time, the low hanging fruit has already been picked. If I understand correctly part of the problem is the number of modules that needs to be loaded from disk at startup. On my computer the first run is slower than subsequent runs due to caching. Maybe an "compile several modules into a single file" approach might improve things - but it's not trivial project.