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The question came from a young member of the audience. It was phrased something like: "Why isn't Racket used in industry like OCaml is used by Jane Street."

The question came from a young member of the audience. It was phrased something like: "Why isn't Racket used in industry like OCaml is used by Jane Street." And what can you answer to that? Of course the Racket would like for some both commercial users as well as sponsors. In fact [1] Racket changed its license from LGPL to Apache 2.0 or the MIT license to make sure it can be used commercially. The fact is that language popularity isn't determined by quality of language/implementation alone. Having companies like Apple (Swift) and Google (Go) backing a language helps tremendously. [1] https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-relicensing-effort.html https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-rel...

bdw5204 3y ago
The major issue Racket has is the same one other functional languages have: its hard to find any developers who know those languages or are willing to work in them. There are compelling arguments for functional programming[0] and I enjoyed programming in both Racket and Chez Scheme in college but I never bothered putting it on my resume because functional programming isn't widely used. The corporate world is mostly obsessed with OOP to the extent that every new imperative/procedural language like Go or Rust has to pretend to be OOP to get corporate adoption. Functional languages can't pretend to be OOP so they can't get past the corporate filter except at a handful of firms that use them for competitive advantage. It also isn't easy to get the few functional programming jobs that do exist because they're often looking for developers who already have professional functional programming experience and that isn't easy to get unless you're already at a company that uses functional programming. [0]: One of the most compelling pro-functional programming arguments is this one which argues that mutable state (being able to alter a variable's value after you set it) and variables being able to be null are harmful like GOTO statements: https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming

bdw5204 3y ago

The major issue Racket has is the same one other functional languages have: its hard to find any developers who know those languages or are willing to work in them. There are compelling arguments for functional programming[0] and I enjoyed programming in both Racket and Chez Scheme in college but I never bothered putting it on my resume because functional programming isn't widely used. The corporate world is mostly obsessed with OOP to the extent that every new imperative/procedural language like Go or Rust has to pretend to be OOP to get corporate adoption. Functional languages can't pretend to be OOP so they can't get past the corporate filter except at a handful of firms that use them for competitive advantage. It also isn't easy to get the few functional programming jobs that do exist because they're often looking for developers who already have professional functional programming experience and that isn't easy to get unless you're already at a company that uses functional programming. [0]: One of the most compelling pro-functional programming arguments is this one which argues that mutable state (being able to alter a variable's value after you set it) and variables being able to be null are harmful like GOTO statements: https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming