3 ms·

Did not try Racket specifically, but I did quite a lot of work with Dr. Scheme 15/20 years ago, which I think is Racket's ancestor? It would allow you to defin

Did not try Racket specifically, but I did quite a lot of work with Dr. Scheme 15/20 years ago, which I think is Racket's ancestor? It would allow you to define variables which were actual images. The image was a thumbnail in the code, which you could assign and print. It was mind blowing. Also your Lambda keywords could be replaced with an actual Lambda symbol, which was the pinnacle of coolness. This, as well as the super snappy and responsive split REPL, made the overall development experience with Scheme feel super futuristic and just a pure enjoyment all around.

Y_Y 3y ago
It's got myriad other issues, but Mathematica is a lot like this. You can have "rich" literals like a sound file or and image or a 3d model and see and manipulate along with the source, which has a couple of different levels of syntactic sugar, from being an ugly text-only lisp up to stuff that looks like it comes from a well-illustrated text book. What's missing from my life is a good FOSS equivalent. There are several wonderful tools which do similar things, e.g. Jupyter, org-babel, TeXmacs, Sage, mathics. None of them feel quite right though.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  I once had fantasies about starting an open source project for Common Lisp that would attempt to implement a little bit of the Wolfram data display stuff. I stopped paying for LispWorks, so I no longer have CAPI for GUIs, so that is not going to happen. Racket’s UI support would make Racket a good platform for an open source project like this. (I won’t work on it, LLMs are so much more fascinating than any other tech, and use up my free time). I did recently pay for an entire year of Wolfram Desktop in the hope of really getting into it. I have code experiments for all the stuff I love (machine learning, deep learning, LLM, semantic web, etc.) but to be honest using the Wolfram Language does not give me the joy that I get using Common Lisp,and various Schemes, and, for some things Python is the most practical language.
- bitwize 3y ago
  HolyC is like this as well.
- xdavidliu 3y ago
  i bought a year sub to the “deluxe” pack of mathematica for like 300usd. it was pretty good, but one glaring weakness is lack of lazy streams. This came to my attention when i attempted problem 7ish in project euler, which asked something like “sum all the fibonacci numbers less than a million” or something. Woulda been perfectly elegantly done in Haskell using a stream and only TAKEing what I needed, but in mathematica I need an imperatice monstrosity using Do, For, While, etc. I was absolutely disgusted and didnt bother renewing.
spdegabrielle 3y ago
It has changed quite a bit in 20 years

Y_Y 3y ago

It's got myriad other issues, but Mathematica is a lot like this. You can have "rich" literals like a sound file or and image or a 3d model and see and manipulate along with the source, which has a couple of different levels of syntactic sugar, from being an ugly text-only lisp up to stuff that looks like it comes from a well-illustrated text book. What's missing from my life is a good FOSS equivalent. There are several wonderful tools which do similar things, e.g. Jupyter, org-babel, TeXmacs, Sage, mathics. None of them feel quite right though.

mark_l_watson 3y ago
I once had fantasies about starting an open source project for Common Lisp that would attempt to implement a little bit of the Wolfram data display stuff. I stopped paying for LispWorks, so I no longer have CAPI for GUIs, so that is not going to happen. Racket’s UI support would make Racket a good platform for an open source project like this. (I won’t work on it, LLMs are so much more fascinating than any other tech, and use up my free time). I did recently pay for an entire year of Wolfram Desktop in the hope of really getting into it. I have code experiments for all the stuff I love (machine learning, deep learning, LLM, semantic web, etc.) but to be honest using the Wolfram Language does not give me the joy that I get using Common Lisp,and various Schemes, and, for some things Python is the most practical language.
bitwize 3y ago
HolyC is like this as well.
xdavidliu 3y ago
i bought a year sub to the “deluxe” pack of mathematica for like 300usd. it was pretty good, but one glaring weakness is lack of lazy streams. This came to my attention when i attempted problem 7ish in project euler, which asked something like “sum all the fibonacci numbers less than a million” or something. Woulda been perfectly elegantly done in Haskell using a stream and only TAKEing what I needed, but in mathematica I need an imperatice monstrosity using Do, For, While, etc. I was absolutely disgusted and didnt bother renewing.

spdegabrielle 3y ago

It has changed quite a bit in 20 years