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I have used Racket in production for a decade and a half, with great success. Racket belongs to a sort of invasive species equivalent in languages, in the sense
by dexterlagan 2y ago
I have used Racket in production for a decade and a half, with great success. Racket belongs to a sort of invasive species equivalent in languages, in the sense that once it has a hold on you, all other languages, old and new, vanish from your mind. The elegance of Scheme married with the power of hygienic macros does a great job at tricking your mind into believing Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language idea again.
What if Racket and Python had a child? Rhombus represents much, much more to us Racketeers. It may quite possibly be the crown jewel of multi-paradigm meta-programming languages and most importantly, a possible solution to the 's-expression barrier'. Who knows, it might even make a dent in the LISP curse. And we were all hoping for this. We were all waiting for this. And so I applaud the enormous effort involved, and I hope it inspires people to try a different approach to programming, and to language in general. It represents an impressive achievement in terms of elegance, pragmatism/practicality and efficiency in a language built atop a very solid foundation, coming from one of the greatest lineage of programming languages in history.
Like many others, I have been waiting for a killer app, a real showcase of the power of language-oriented programming. I was secretly hoping Rhombus would become a catalyst to the production of something great. While the emergence of LLMs presents challenges, it doesn't have to seal the fate of amazing purely and proudly human innovations like this one. My GitHub account may be filled with Racket code few will ever use, but Rhombus gives me new inspiration.
Sure, the future of programming might involve neural networks programming CPUs and GPUs directly. We're getting there. Yesterday we were programming with cryptic machine language, today we program computers with increasingly natural syntax. Tomorrow we might just tell machines what we need. But that doesn't make what we're doing now any less significant or exciting.
We programmers aren't going anywhere just yet, and many of us will keep writing code because we love it, not just because we have to. And now we have this pinnacle of human ingenuity in the form of a beautiful language, a love letter to the art of programming by humans, for humans. Thank you.
- ashton314 2y agoCan you tell me more about what you're building with Racket? Warms my heart to hear about/see Racket being used in production.
- dexterlagan 2y agoThe last app I worked on was an advanced Harmony/Flow(ex-shotgrid) bridge which let production staff manage Flow's database, upload assets and work on scenes without having to deal much with Flow's horrible UI. Over the years I have written hundreds of small tools to automate production and assist artists with their workflows in Harmony. Racket's built in UI library and supremely maintainable syntax made it very easy and fun to work with. I published quite a few apps and tools of variable quality at https://github.com/dexterlagan https://github.com/dexterlagan