5 ms·

> Racket is the best for a beginner, but it keeps having that academic, "we made it for the kids" feel of being easy to understand but not very pragmatic for a

> Racket is the best for a beginner, but it keeps having that academic, "we made it for the kids" feel of being easy to understand but not very pragmatic for a seasoned programmer. And it is one of a kind, so a good Racket developer might never know Lisp itself. As someone trying to write definitively about cold hard reasons Racket remains in relative obscurity, I would be interested to know specifics you can provide for this view. Is it just academia vibes? Or are there specific aspects of Racket that in your view repel “seasoned programmers”? I notice you praise Guile for having decent documentation and standard library. How do you believe Racket’s documentation and standard library compare to Guile’s?

sph 3y ago
Sorry, I don't have anything more concrete than "general vibes." Like, there's thousands of libraries and modules in Racket, sometimes competing with each other, that feel like they have been developed for a school project and kept around. And it is no secret that Matthew Flatt, one of the lead developers, is actually a professor at Utah University. In my experience, it is pretty easy to tell when a language and ecosystem is developed in academia, or developed by software engineers by trade. They have two very different goals and approaches to the same problem. The former might focus on educational purpose for newbies, the latter on shipping production-ready software for professionals. (In my humble opinion, this is one of the reasons Smalltalk never went very far in the real world. Too much focus on the educational aspect of it.)
- igouy 3y ago
  Is "Smalltalk never went very far in the real world" also based on nothing more concrete than "general vibes." ? "A Shipping Industry Case Study" https://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pdf https://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pd... How do you know what corporations used to develop custom business systems?
a1369209993 3y ago
> Or are there specific aspects of Racket that in your view repel [competent programmers]? This is anecdotal and over a decade ago, but quite specific: my first exposure to Racket was with a version of the language (I think it was some pragma-type thing like `#lang`, but it's been a while) allegedly intended for CS classes, and included something along the lines of [exact spelling and phrasing almost certainly differ]: > (cons 'foo 'bar) error: cons: 'bar is not a list I immediately deleted the Racket installation and added it to the same set of blacklists as the Java Virtual Machine (and hypothetically any COBOL implementations I ever encounter). That any version of the language would behave that way, much less one purportedly intended for people who are only just learning LISP in the first place, is a insult to everyone who ever bothered to actually learn LISP in the first place. This is the sort of "Dangling by a Trivial Feature"[0] thing that there's just no excuse for, like trying out a new text editor and discoving that pressing backspace inserts the text "^H", except it was clearly deliberately aimed at people who didn't know any better and would 'hopefully' not realise there was a problem, rather than just being a local idiosyncracy[1], because cons did work correctly under other dialect settings. Actively trying to fuck over newcomers who are only just learning LISP (or programming in general) deeply offends me. 0: https://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html 1: In which case I still wouldn't use Racket myself, but I wouldn't be actively opposed to anyone else doing so.
- drekipus 3y ago
  I've dabbled in a few lisps and definitely a noobie but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
  - logicprog 3y ago
    That language behavior fundamentally misrepresents how a proper cons should actually work. It's a link between any two values, represented as essentially two joined pointers, one to each value. It represents a linked list when cons cells are nested, but that's just something that falls out of the far more beautiful and fundamental core axiom of the cons cell, not all of what cons cells are. Thus claiming cons cells must be nested (which is what requiring the second argument of cons to be a list (I.e. more nested cons cells or nil) implies) is actually bastardizing what a cons cell is, reducing it to a menial operation for producing lists that means the same thing as "prepend" instead of an elegant core abstraction you can derive further things from. Bastardizing it like this, honestly especially in a language for teaching CS, in the name of talking down to students, is unforgivable. I learned Common Lisp at 12 partially from Land of Lisp and partially from a Lisp 1.5 manual and experimentation. Properly learning the core abstractions was vital.

sph 3y ago

Sorry, I don't have anything more concrete than "general vibes." Like, there's thousands of libraries and modules in Racket, sometimes competing with each other, that feel like they have been developed for a school project and kept around. And it is no secret that Matthew Flatt, one of the lead developers, is actually a professor at Utah University. In my experience, it is pretty easy to tell when a language and ecosystem is developed in academia, or developed by software engineers by trade. They have two very different goals and approaches to the same problem. The former might focus on educational purpose for newbies, the latter on shipping production-ready software for professionals. (In my humble opinion, this is one of the reasons Smalltalk never went very far in the real world. Too much focus on the educational aspect of it.)

igouy 3y ago
Is "Smalltalk never went very far in the real world" also based on nothing more concrete than "general vibes." ? "A Shipping Industry Case Study" https://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pdf https://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pd... How do you know what corporations used to develop custom business systems?

a1369209993 3y ago

> Or are there specific aspects of Racket that in your view repel [competent programmers]? This is anecdotal and over a decade ago, but quite specific: my first exposure to Racket was with a version of the language (I think it was some pragma-type thing like `#lang`, but it's been a while) allegedly intended for CS classes, and included something along the lines of [exact spelling and phrasing almost certainly differ]: > (cons 'foo 'bar) error: cons: 'bar is not a list I immediately deleted the Racket installation and added it to the same set of blacklists as the Java Virtual Machine (and hypothetically any COBOL implementations I ever encounter). That any version of the language would behave that way, much less one purportedly intended for people who are only just learning LISP in the first place, is a insult to everyone who ever bothered to actually learn LISP in the first place. This is the sort of "Dangling by a Trivial Feature"[0] thing that there's just no excuse for, like trying out a new text editor and discoving that pressing backspace inserts the text "^H", except it was clearly deliberately aimed at people who didn't know any better and would 'hopefully' not realise there was a problem, rather than just being a local idiosyncracy[1], because cons did work correctly under other dialect settings. Actively trying to fuck over newcomers who are only just learning LISP (or programming in general) deeply offends me. 0: https://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html 1: In which case I still wouldn't use Racket myself, but I wouldn't be actively opposed to anyone else doing so.

drekipus 3y ago
I've dabbled in a few lisps and definitely a noobie but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
- logicprog 3y ago
  That language behavior fundamentally misrepresents how a proper cons should actually work. It's a link between any two values, represented as essentially two joined pointers, one to each value. It represents a linked list when cons cells are nested, but that's just something that falls out of the far more beautiful and fundamental core axiom of the cons cell, not all of what cons cells are. Thus claiming cons cells must be nested (which is what requiring the second argument of cons to be a list (I.e. more nested cons cells or nil) implies) is actually bastardizing what a cons cell is, reducing it to a menial operation for producing lists that means the same thing as "prepend" instead of an elegant core abstraction you can derive further things from. Bastardizing it like this, honestly especially in a language for teaching CS, in the name of talking down to students, is unforgivable. I learned Common Lisp at 12 partially from Land of Lisp and partially from a Lisp 1.5 manual and experimentation. Properly learning the core abstractions was vital.