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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 any

• neilv 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    Oh! okay, heavy misunderstanding by using DrRacket. Thanks for the clarification :)
  • djtango 2y ago
    For someone lazy - what is the set up for the "evil" amongst aka vim users
    • neilv 2y ago
      https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Vim.html
    • xhevahir 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      Conjure (https://github.com/Olical/conjure https://github.com/Olical/conjure) for neovim should work quite well. I've been using it for quite some.time with Janet(another lisp)
  • jnxx 2y ago
    I think Guile is a good example that one can have an SBCL-like workflow of live coding (with debugging and jumping right into a stack trace) in Scheme. I have heard that this is not possible because Racket needs to make a stricgter separation of compile time and run time... but I am not sure whether this is actually true.
    • neilv 2y ago
      Regarding the stricter separation, Racket and its module system have nicely clear concepts of phases. (I really like how the Racket module system has been used these to benefit the language.) But, though I don't know current Racket internals, I'm not sure those need to be a barrier to monkeypatching that approaches CL. Other than optimizations that make some debugging info and dynamic changes difficult-to-impossible, if the system had a mode to disable these optimizations (or to maintain some information in parallel that permits a cascading unraveling of optimizations affected by a change), I'm not aware of a fundamental reason the system couldn't support more loose poking at things. Though, one implementation complication that Schemes do have is first-class continuations.