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I am happy to see Racket make it to the front page. After using mostly Common Lisp for research programming since 1982, I now more often turn to Racket. There a

I am happy to see Racket make it to the front page. After using mostly Common Lisp for research programming since 1982, I now more often turn to Racket. There are parts of Racket I don’t like, which is most everything *NOT* the compiler, package management system, GUI IDE, Emacs bindings, fun language to use. I don’t care for much of the programming language research parts of the ecosystem - that is the parts that the computer scientist professors who run the project probably care about the most. More power to them! So I feel like a freeloader on the Racket project, just enjoying the little parts I like and ignoring the rest, and not contributing anything (except maybe the little Racket book I wrote).

spdegabrielle 3y ago
What are the 'programming language research parts of the ecosystem'? The only part of the Racket distribution I can see that is specifically 'programming language research' is Redex. In the language itself there are the metaprogramming capabilities - but all modern languages have metaprogramming. My experience of the community is it is generally people talking about real problems. People do use Racket for PL and other research, so a number of PL research papers and conference talks do reference Racket, but it doesn't dominate any of the discussion. e.g. https://racket.discourse.group/t/levin-tree-search-with-context-models/1984?u=spdegabrielle https://racket.discourse.group/t/levin-tree-search-with-cont...
MarceColl 3y ago
how do you deal with the very bad Racket repl? Thats what turned me off the language edit: I dont reslly understand the downvotes, not trying to be rude or anything. Coming from CL the racket repl is very very barebones, it loses all state everytime you recompile. So I ask him how he deals with that coming from the very nice CL repl
- neilv 3y ago
  The REPL in DrRacket is like that because it was made by professors, specifically targeting intro students who had never programmed before. They thought a big Run button with a clean slate each time would be less confusing. You don't have to use DrRacket to use Racket. People doing real work with Racket tend to have "workflow" setups that are closer to SLIME. I personally used a simpler Emacs setup ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/"), and ended up leaning more on modules and embedded unit tests ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/overeasy/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/overeasy/"), and less on very dynamic interactive evaluation like I'd done before. Though, if you want to monkeypatch heavily, CL is famously good at that.
  - samth 3y ago
    Very few people I know doing real work in Racket have a SLIME-like workflow. In general, Racket discouraging this style is related to us being a bunch of professors, but not really in the way you say. Instead, it's because it's not possible to give a sensible semantics to the top-level, especially in the presence of macros. We care a lot about macros, and we also care a lot about sensible semantics, and thus the attitude towards the REPL. The slogan in the Racket community that "the top level is hopeless" expresses this sentiment.
  - MarceColl 3y ago
    Oh! okay, heavy misunderstanding by using DrRacket. Thanks for the clarification :)
  - djtango 3y ago
    For someone lazy - what is the set up for the "evil" amongst aka vim users
    - neilv 3y ago
      https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html
    - xhevahir 3y ago
      There was a nice extension called DivaScheme that used unchorded keystrokes like vi and allowed structural editing but it stopped working when PLT Scheme reached version 5. (Which I think was when they changed the name to Racket.) https://cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/ https://cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/
    - arbitrandomuser 3y ago
      https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime you can have a REPL in nvim/vim/tmux/screen/another terminal/or any other window , and send regions from your vim buffer to that repl
    - tionis 3y ago
lettergram 3y ago
Having used Racket in college for programing language ecosystem, I can say I don't enjoy that aspect either haha. Racket is easy to get started with and definitely great at what it does. If you're wading into Lisp IMO it's the way to go. That said, IMO Clojure has a larger and more robust community, that said it's a bit of a bigger pain to set up (uses JVM) & has some more nuance.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Uses the JVM is exactly why Clojure is the Lisp like language I mostly bother with. What matters are ecosystems and not languages on their own, so when switching between languages it is a great benefit that I can reuse my Java ecosystem knowledge, instead of adding yet another ecosystem to those I jump around between projects. However, I really like the almost Lisp Machine like experience from using Raket.
  - lispm 3y ago
    IMHO, the Lisp Machine experience is completely different. Those have zero educational aspects, they were designed to write large, and stateful, applications, where the Lisp Machine OS is the big stateful object-oriented operating system (like Symbolics Genera). Interlisp-D is even more different.
- jnxx 3y ago
  One feeling I have is that while Clojure is incredibly tasteful, well-designed and elegant, it is less focused on Correctness as Racket. And this gives me the feeling that if I make some mistake (say, erroneously swapping arguments of a complex function that e.g. computes on list as sets), I do not know what is going to happen.
- eru 3y ago
  Clojure's biggest advantage, integration with the JVM ecosystem, is also its biggest drawback. JVM compatibility forces a lot of ugly compromises on Clojure.
oumua_don17 3y ago
I use CL on a day to day basis (and not in research/PL research domain), have never ventured into Racked yet. Can you please elaborate further on parts of Racket you don't like vis a vis CL? Thanks!
- shawn_w 3y ago
  Not Mark, but I use Racket a lot and sometimes play with Common Lisp. CLOS is way nicer than Racket's class/OO model and how generic functions are handled. Growable/resizable arrays are sometimes nice to have. I prefer Racket and Scheme for the most part though.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read I'd say this counts as a phenomenal contribution. :)
darby_eight 3y ago
Ok, so to state the obvious, if you don't turn to racket for "programming language research" why do you use the language at all?
- djtango 3y ago
  As a Clojure developer who did write some Racket, there is a satisfying purity to Scheme (at least to me).
  - darby_eight 3y ago
    This is a wonderful answer! I return to my main calling: figuring out why people use PLT scheme without an academic incentive. There must be an answer here somewhere....
    - triyambakam 3y ago
      Is this a joke or why don't you think they answered the question?
      - darby_eight 3y ago
        [flagged]
        runesoerensen 3y ago
        This is just getting more confusing.
        darby_eight 3y ago
        amen
        runesoerensen 3y ago
        Also (about HN and racket): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
You might be happy (or sad) to hear you‘ve just qualified for the HN humble-brag finals.
- rpdillon 3y ago
  There is something edgy about calling oneself a community freeloader and then casually mentioning you wrote a book on the topic.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
I agree with every word of this. The packet management system, the GUI IDE (which includes a step debugger), the ability to write a cross platform IDE (which is maintained by the core Racket team themselves), and the ability to easily produce runnable binaries make Racket my favorite Lisp hands down. Those features are so incredibly useful and important, I really can't state it enough. I love Lisps, but at work, I will only use a language if it's the best tool for a job. Because of several of those features, Racket has been the only Lisp I've ever been able to justify using. Because of the community, tooling and learning resources available, Racket is such an easy language for me personally to recommend to people. There are things I really like about CL and Clojure too, both of which I have used quite a bit, but I would never recommend them to people because of some huge drawbacks that come with each. I also don't jive with the research parts of the language , nor do I care about the "lang" facilities, and I also kind of strongly dislike HtDP. But my perspective on all that is that they are projects I am uninterested in that happened to be made with a language I love, rather than knocks against the language itself, because I never bump up against them.
temporarely 3y ago
"Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter." (Thank you for the book - will be reading)

spdegabrielle 3y ago

What are the 'programming language research parts of the ecosystem'? The only part of the Racket distribution I can see that is specifically 'programming language research' is Redex. In the language itself there are the metaprogramming capabilities - but all modern languages have metaprogramming. My experience of the community is it is generally people talking about real problems. People do use Racket for PL and other research, so a number of PL research papers and conference talks do reference Racket, but it doesn't dominate any of the discussion. e.g. https://racket.discourse.group/t/levin-tree-search-with-context-models/1984?u=spdegabrielle https://racket.discourse.group/t/levin-tree-search-with-cont...

MarceColl 3y ago

how do you deal with the very bad Racket repl? Thats what turned me off the language edit: I dont reslly understand the downvotes, not trying to be rude or anything. Coming from CL the racket repl is very very barebones, it loses all state everytime you recompile. So I ask him how he deals with that coming from the very nice CL repl

neilv 3y ago
The REPL in DrRacket is like that because it was made by professors, specifically targeting intro students who had never programmed before. They thought a big Run button with a clean slate each time would be less confusing. You don't have to use DrRacket to use Racket. People doing real work with Racket tend to have "workflow" setups that are closer to SLIME. I personally used a simpler Emacs setup ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/"), and ended up leaning more on modules and embedded unit tests ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/overeasy/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/overeasy/"), and less on very dynamic interactive evaluation like I'd done before. Though, if you want to monkeypatch heavily, CL is famously good at that.
- samth 3y ago
  Very few people I know doing real work in Racket have a SLIME-like workflow. In general, Racket discouraging this style is related to us being a bunch of professors, but not really in the way you say. Instead, it's because it's not possible to give a sensible semantics to the top-level, especially in the presence of macros. We care a lot about macros, and we also care a lot about sensible semantics, and thus the attitude towards the REPL. The slogan in the Racket community that "the top level is hopeless" expresses this sentiment.
- MarceColl 3y ago
  Oh! okay, heavy misunderstanding by using DrRacket. Thanks for the clarification :)
- djtango 3y ago
  For someone lazy - what is the set up for the "evil" amongst aka vim users
  - neilv 3y ago
    https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html
  - xhevahir 3y ago
    There was a nice extension called DivaScheme that used unchorded keystrokes like vi and allowed structural editing but it stopped working when PLT Scheme reached version 5. (Which I think was when they changed the name to Racket.) https://cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/ https://cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/
  - arbitrandomuser 3y ago
    https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime you can have a REPL in nvim/vim/tmux/screen/another terminal/or any other window , and send regions from your vim buffer to that repl
  - tionis 3y ago

lettergram 3y ago

Having used Racket in college for programing language ecosystem, I can say I don't enjoy that aspect either haha. Racket is easy to get started with and definitely great at what it does. If you're wading into Lisp IMO it's the way to go. That said, IMO Clojure has a larger and more robust community, that said it's a bit of a bigger pain to set up (uses JVM) & has some more nuance.

pjmlp 3y ago
Uses the JVM is exactly why Clojure is the Lisp like language I mostly bother with. What matters are ecosystems and not languages on their own, so when switching between languages it is a great benefit that I can reuse my Java ecosystem knowledge, instead of adding yet another ecosystem to those I jump around between projects. However, I really like the almost Lisp Machine like experience from using Raket.
- lispm 3y ago
  IMHO, the Lisp Machine experience is completely different. Those have zero educational aspects, they were designed to write large, and stateful, applications, where the Lisp Machine OS is the big stateful object-oriented operating system (like Symbolics Genera). Interlisp-D is even more different.
jnxx 3y ago
One feeling I have is that while Clojure is incredibly tasteful, well-designed and elegant, it is less focused on Correctness as Racket. And this gives me the feeling that if I make some mistake (say, erroneously swapping arguments of a complex function that e.g. computes on list as sets), I do not know what is going to happen.
eru 3y ago
Clojure's biggest advantage, integration with the JVM ecosystem, is also its biggest drawback. JVM compatibility forces a lot of ugly compromises on Clojure.

oumua_don17 3y ago

I use CL on a day to day basis (and not in research/PL research domain), have never ventured into Racked yet. Can you please elaborate further on parts of Racket you don't like vis a vis CL? Thanks!

shawn_w 3y ago
Not Mark, but I use Racket a lot and sometimes play with Common Lisp. CLOS is way nicer than Racket's class/OO model and how generic functions are handled. Growable/resizable arrays are sometimes nice to have. I prefer Racket and Scheme for the most part though.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read I'd say this counts as a phenomenal contribution. :)

darby_eight 3y ago

Ok, so to state the obvious, if you don't turn to racket for "programming language research" why do you use the language at all?

djtango 3y ago
As a Clojure developer who did write some Racket, there is a satisfying purity to Scheme (at least to me).
- darby_eight 3y ago
  This is a wonderful answer! I return to my main calling: figuring out why people use PLT scheme without an academic incentive. There must be an answer here somewhere....
  - triyambakam 3y ago
    Is this a joke or why don't you think they answered the question?
    - darby_eight 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - runesoerensen 3y ago
        This is just getting more confusing.
        darby_eight 3y ago
        amen
        runesoerensen 3y ago
        Also (about HN and racket): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

You might be happy (or sad) to hear you‘ve just qualified for the HN humble-brag finals.

rpdillon 3y ago
There is something edgy about calling oneself a community freeloader and then casually mentioning you wrote a book on the topic.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

I agree with every word of this. The packet management system, the GUI IDE (which includes a step debugger), the ability to write a cross platform IDE (which is maintained by the core Racket team themselves), and the ability to easily produce runnable binaries make Racket my favorite Lisp hands down. Those features are so incredibly useful and important, I really can't state it enough. I love Lisps, but at work, I will only use a language if it's the best tool for a job. Because of several of those features, Racket has been the only Lisp I've ever been able to justify using. Because of the community, tooling and learning resources available, Racket is such an easy language for me personally to recommend to people. There are things I really like about CL and Clojure too, both of which I have used quite a bit, but I would never recommend them to people because of some huge drawbacks that come with each. I also don't jive with the research parts of the language , nor do I care about the "lang" facilities, and I also kind of strongly dislike HtDP. But my perspective on all that is that they are projects I am uninterested in that happened to be made with a language I love, rather than knocks against the language itself, because I never bump up against them.

temporarely 3y ago

"Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter." (Thank you for the book - will be reading)