15 ms·

Rhombus 1.1 is now available

128 points by spdegabrielle 2mo ago

spdegabrielle 2mo ago
We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org https://rhombus-lang.org Rhombus is easy to use and uniquely customizable. See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html for the release announcement and highlights.
- JoelMcCracken 2mo ago
  I experimented with Rhombus some time ago (most especially with Shplait). Is there much new with Shplait? Something I remember struggling with was trying to use racket libraries in Rhombus/Shplait
threatofrain 2mo ago
The way the Rhombus / Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries. https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus
- sorawee 2mo ago
  I agree that a ranking mechanism would be nice, but what do you mean by "fraud garbage"? I personally am not aware of any malicious package in the Racket ecosystem.
  - fn-mote 2mo ago
    Perhaps they are referring to the fact that the package server does not hide the email of the contributor? Not that this is a complaint worth airing on HN. Solution: just block the alias that you use for the submission…
    - soegaard 2mo ago
      The email is obfuscated. https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/ https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/ And has been for a long while.
  - threatofrain 2mo ago
    > Being a contributor on there
    - sorawee 2mo ago
      Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that was indeed problematic. We kinda fixed this issue a while back by obfuscating emails (https://github.com/racket/racket-pkg-website/pull/88 https://github.com/racket/racket-pkg-website/pull/88), but it doesn't help with already scraped emails. Also, the raw emails are still technically readable if one knows where to look at.
behnamoh 2mo ago
I wish they had chosen a more "modern" name for the language.
- jambutters 2mo ago
  Honestly a unique searchable name is better. I type in racket and results are mixed with tennis and I need to suffix "Language"
  - peesem 2mo ago
    well, i also have to type "rhombus language" to get relevant results for the rhombus language
  - jimbob45 2mo ago
    .NET/.NET Core/.NET Framework migration is painful because of this. VS/VSCode is sometimes only possible with AI’s help.
  - sudahtigabulan 2mo ago
    There is a naming tradition in the Lisp world, which Racket devs apparently have chosen over searchability. Qualities or activities that have negative connotations. Guile. Gauche. Larceny. Racket. I think it started with theorem provers - Planner, Conniver. Then Scheme[r].
    - neilv 2mo ago
      A funny thing was, when the rename to Racket was still fairly new, someone started looking into adopters in the finance space.
    - Y_Y 2mo ago
      I don't think Gauche fits there. There is a tradition of naming with synonyms for "scheme" (as in a criminal enterprise) like the others you listed, with some more peripheral ones like Gambit, Ruse, Artifice.
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
Racket was always one of my favorite Lisp / Scheme dialect, mainly because of its very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort, that and Dr Racket lets you see visually where import goes into code, and a bunch of other nice things. Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages! That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to. The entire Rhombus repo is all Racket: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++language%3ARacket&type=issues https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++languag...
- spdegabrielle 2mo ago
  FWIW Rhombus is about 70% Racket and 30% Rhombus (by loc)
- piloto_ciego 2mo ago
  I really want to like Racket? I really do, but I just never really enjoyed like I liked Python. And despite trying a bunch of other Lisps and liking them, something about Dr. Racket annoyed me. I'm not sure why. It's "cool" and the ecosystem rules, and it's fast enough, I just never really found that I liked writing Racket or using Dr. Racket the same way I like writing Python so I never really reached for it when I was trying to do something. Indeed, from the first time I looked at Python I liked it. That was not the case with Javascript or Java or C or PHP? I don't know, I like Python and really want a practical Lisp that I can really sink my teeth into? So by all accounts I should love Racket. And yet, I don't. That said, Rhombus looks really nice at first glance. This might be worth a sustained excursion to build something a bit more fun... I'm kind of excited about this!
  - giraffe_lady 2mo ago
    Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much and not able to put my finger on why. It's not even top 10 languages or top 5 lisps for me but it is just incredibly practical. I have zero passion for this language. The way I use racket its main competitor is python. It's for when I want to accomplish something with heavy third party deps, and I have zero interest in writing the actual cool code I just need to make some libraries kiss and then use my tool. Not saying that's the case here but maybe racket just doesn't offer you much that python doesn't? Sounds like you'd get more from just using one of the other lisps you liked, especially if there's a more specialized one that wouldn't be competing with a language you probably would prefer to use anyway. Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel.
Skywing 2mo ago
With AI becoming so predominant, I wonder if dynamically typed languages will lose favorability? Seems to me like a heavily documented, statically typed language is going to be ideal for AI programming. I'm wondering what role these flexible, coder-friendly, dynamically typed languages will play in the years to come.
- soanvig 2mo ago
  Actually, staticly typed languages are easier for both humans and machines; however dynamically typed languages are harder for humans and probably neutral for LLMs. LLM should be able to infer usage (hence "typing") because it can put the entire codebase in its context, while humans cannot.
  - rgoulter 2mo ago
    I'd count in LLM coding agents favour: e.g. willingness and capability to do things which I'd have to go read a tutorial for; as well as rapidly being able to iterate and narrow down e.g. when given access to a repl. Rhombus looks promising in terms of tooling. On the other hand: LLMs are susceptible to incorrectly guessing "I think it should work this way".. I'd guess the powerful flexibility of metaprogramming could be more annoying than helpful. But, I'm curious.
- mark_l_watson 2mo ago
  That is a really good question. My personal intuition is that LLMs do well with any language as long as you set up for fast syntax checking tools, access to either a REPL or very fast to run tests, etc. I usually use small local models, and the work to set up very concise skills and efficient tooling is a big part of the fun. I have also adopted the practice of writing my own custom coding harnesses (these can be less than 2000 lines of code, not the huge project you might expect.)
antonyragleap 2mo ago
The practicality of Racket is interesting; sometimes a language wins simply because its ecosystem makes certain tasks much easier.
dexterlagan 2mo ago
Rhombus is what Racket should have been, back when it was the learning language at MIT, before it became Python. Had it been like this, maybe Python would have never gained traction within that community. The world would have been a very different place. Rhombus' syntax is soooo beautiful. As a Racketeer, it's my dream language. All the power of Racket... without a Lots of Insipid, Stupid Parenthesis. Not that I don't like the parens, mind you, but Rhombus looks so much more... 2009. My only regret is that nobody will use Rhombus, except a few enthusiasts, for fun. In an AI age, new programming languages should really be LLM-first, sadly. But it makes me so happy that there are some people who still care about humans coding.
- neilv 2mo ago
  IIRC, MIT moved away from SICP, and therefore Scheme, because (something like) they saw the field for MIT EECS graduates changing -- from understanding how systems worked in detail, and being able to build from scratch, to assembling systems from off-the-shelf components. And I guess some thought that a currently popular language (first Java, and then Python) was more appealing for that. One of the other objections to SICP, at least outside of MIT, was that it was too hard (especially for high school students). Which is part of why HtDP, and much of Racket supported that and other educational initiatives by Matthias Felleisen, et al. https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ I'm curious: Did MIT use Racket at some point for SICP, rather than MIT Scheme, either officially or grassroots? Jens Axel Soegaard, Mike Sperber, and I made some conveniences for doing SICP with Racket, circa 2009, but I don't recall hearing that Racket was used for SICP at MIT itself, only at various other places. https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/sicp/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/sicp/
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    And now we are at the point where this is what assembling systems from off-the-shelf components looks like, https://www.workato.com/products/ipaas https://www.workato.com/products/ipaas.
  - bmitc 2mo ago
    They moved to Python because they wanted to (the used a book that had been written by an MIT professor or two), because students were whining about it, and because of corporate pressure.
mherdelight 2mo ago
I never really liked Python's indentation-instead-of-curly-brackets thing, why are people reusing it?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
  > why are people reusing it? Python has remained in the top 5 (often near or at the top) most used programming languages for years. Meaningful whitespace is not stopping people from using it in enough numbers to make it clear that it's a detriment as a language feature.
- tiagod 2mo ago
  Because whether you like it is not really of any importance to most people.
- soegaard 2mo ago
  As most other things - you get used to it. But it's important to note, at you need editor support for rendindenting blocks easily and correctly.
- rtpg 2mo ago
  I love it. I'm gonna indent anyways for clarity! I'm... not a super fan of rhombus' emphasis on metaprogramming beyond supporting the language itself though.

128 points by spdegabrielle 2mo ago

We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org https://rhombus-lang.org Rhombus is easy to use and uniquely customizable. See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html for the release announcement and highlights.

JoelMcCracken 2mo ago
I experimented with Rhombus some time ago (most especially with Shplait). Is there much new with Shplait? Something I remember struggling with was trying to use racket libraries in Rhombus/Shplait

threatofrain 2mo ago

The way the Rhombus / Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries. https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus

sorawee 2mo ago
I agree that a ranking mechanism would be nice, but what do you mean by "fraud garbage"? I personally am not aware of any malicious package in the Racket ecosystem.
- fn-mote 2mo ago
  Perhaps they are referring to the fact that the package server does not hide the email of the contributor? Not that this is a complaint worth airing on HN. Solution: just block the alias that you use for the submission…
  - soegaard 2mo ago
    The email is obfuscated. https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/ https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/ And has been for a long while.
- threatofrain 2mo ago
  > Being a contributor on there
  - sorawee 2mo ago
    Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that was indeed problematic. We kinda fixed this issue a while back by obfuscating emails (https://github.com/racket/racket-pkg-website/pull/88 https://github.com/racket/racket-pkg-website/pull/88), but it doesn't help with already scraped emails. Also, the raw emails are still technically readable if one knows where to look at.

behnamoh 2mo ago

I wish they had chosen a more "modern" name for the language.

jambutters 2mo ago
Honestly a unique searchable name is better. I type in racket and results are mixed with tennis and I need to suffix "Language"
- peesem 2mo ago
  well, i also have to type "rhombus language" to get relevant results for the rhombus language
- jimbob45 2mo ago
  .NET/.NET Core/.NET Framework migration is painful because of this. VS/VSCode is sometimes only possible with AI’s help.
- sudahtigabulan 2mo ago
  There is a naming tradition in the Lisp world, which Racket devs apparently have chosen over searchability. Qualities or activities that have negative connotations. Guile. Gauche. Larceny. Racket. I think it started with theorem provers - Planner, Conniver. Then Scheme[r].
  - neilv 2mo ago
    A funny thing was, when the rename to Racket was still fairly new, someone started looking into adopters in the finance space.
  - Y_Y 2mo ago
    I don't think Gauche fits there. There is a tradition of naming with synonyms for "scheme" (as in a criminal enterprise) like the others you listed, with some more peripheral ones like Gambit, Ruse, Artifice.
Jtsummers 2mo ago

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

Racket was always one of my favorite Lisp / Scheme dialect, mainly because of its very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort, that and Dr Racket lets you see visually where import goes into code, and a bunch of other nice things. Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages! That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to. The entire Rhombus repo is all Racket: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++language%3ARacket&type=issues https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++languag...

spdegabrielle 2mo ago
FWIW Rhombus is about 70% Racket and 30% Rhombus (by loc)
piloto_ciego 2mo ago
I really want to like Racket? I really do, but I just never really enjoyed like I liked Python. And despite trying a bunch of other Lisps and liking them, something about Dr. Racket annoyed me. I'm not sure why. It's "cool" and the ecosystem rules, and it's fast enough, I just never really found that I liked writing Racket or using Dr. Racket the same way I like writing Python so I never really reached for it when I was trying to do something. Indeed, from the first time I looked at Python I liked it. That was not the case with Javascript or Java or C or PHP? I don't know, I like Python and really want a practical Lisp that I can really sink my teeth into? So by all accounts I should love Racket. And yet, I don't. That said, Rhombus looks really nice at first glance. This might be worth a sustained excursion to build something a bit more fun... I'm kind of excited about this!
- giraffe_lady 2mo ago
  Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much and not able to put my finger on why. It's not even top 10 languages or top 5 lisps for me but it is just incredibly practical. I have zero passion for this language. The way I use racket its main competitor is python. It's for when I want to accomplish something with heavy third party deps, and I have zero interest in writing the actual cool code I just need to make some libraries kiss and then use my tool. Not saying that's the case here but maybe racket just doesn't offer you much that python doesn't? Sounds like you'd get more from just using one of the other lisps you liked, especially if there's a more specialized one that wouldn't be competing with a language you probably would prefer to use anyway. Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel.

Skywing 2mo ago

With AI becoming so predominant, I wonder if dynamically typed languages will lose favorability? Seems to me like a heavily documented, statically typed language is going to be ideal for AI programming. I'm wondering what role these flexible, coder-friendly, dynamically typed languages will play in the years to come.

soanvig 2mo ago
Actually, staticly typed languages are easier for both humans and machines; however dynamically typed languages are harder for humans and probably neutral for LLMs. LLM should be able to infer usage (hence "typing") because it can put the entire codebase in its context, while humans cannot.
- rgoulter 2mo ago
  I'd count in LLM coding agents favour: e.g. willingness and capability to do things which I'd have to go read a tutorial for; as well as rapidly being able to iterate and narrow down e.g. when given access to a repl. Rhombus looks promising in terms of tooling. On the other hand: LLMs are susceptible to incorrectly guessing "I think it should work this way".. I'd guess the powerful flexibility of metaprogramming could be more annoying than helpful. But, I'm curious.
mark_l_watson 2mo ago
That is a really good question. My personal intuition is that LLMs do well with any language as long as you set up for fast syntax checking tools, access to either a REPL or very fast to run tests, etc. I usually use small local models, and the work to set up very concise skills and efficient tooling is a big part of the fun. I have also adopted the practice of writing my own custom coding harnesses (these can be less than 2000 lines of code, not the huge project you might expect.)

antonyragleap 2mo ago

The practicality of Racket is interesting; sometimes a language wins simply because its ecosystem makes certain tasks much easier.

dexterlagan 2mo ago

Rhombus is what Racket should have been, back when it was the learning language at MIT, before it became Python. Had it been like this, maybe Python would have never gained traction within that community. The world would have been a very different place. Rhombus' syntax is soooo beautiful. As a Racketeer, it's my dream language. All the power of Racket... without a Lots of Insipid, Stupid Parenthesis. Not that I don't like the parens, mind you, but Rhombus looks so much more... 2009. My only regret is that nobody will use Rhombus, except a few enthusiasts, for fun. In an AI age, new programming languages should really be LLM-first, sadly. But it makes me so happy that there are some people who still care about humans coding.

neilv 2mo ago
IIRC, MIT moved away from SICP, and therefore Scheme, because (something like) they saw the field for MIT EECS graduates changing -- from understanding how systems worked in detail, and being able to build from scratch, to assembling systems from off-the-shelf components. And I guess some thought that a currently popular language (first Java, and then Python) was more appealing for that. One of the other objections to SICP, at least outside of MIT, was that it was too hard (especially for high school students). Which is part of why HtDP, and much of Racket supported that and other educational initiatives by Matthias Felleisen, et al. https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ I'm curious: Did MIT use Racket at some point for SICP, rather than MIT Scheme, either officially or grassroots? Jens Axel Soegaard, Mike Sperber, and I made some conveniences for doing SICP with Racket, circa 2009, but I don't recall hearing that Racket was used for SICP at MIT itself, only at various other places. https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/sicp/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/sicp/
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  And now we are at the point where this is what assembling systems from off-the-shelf components looks like, https://www.workato.com/products/ipaas https://www.workato.com/products/ipaas.
- bmitc 2mo ago
  They moved to Python because they wanted to (the used a book that had been written by an MIT professor or two), because students were whining about it, and because of corporate pressure.

mherdelight 2mo ago

I never really liked Python's indentation-instead-of-curly-brackets thing, why are people reusing it?

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Jtsummers 2mo ago
> why are people reusing it? Python has remained in the top 5 (often near or at the top) most used programming languages for years. Meaningful whitespace is not stopping people from using it in enough numbers to make it clear that it's a detriment as a language feature.
tiagod 2mo ago
Because whether you like it is not really of any importance to most people.
soegaard 2mo ago
As most other things - you get used to it. But it's important to note, at you need editor support for rendindenting blocks easily and correctly.
rtpg 2mo ago
I love it. I'm gonna indent anyways for clarity! I'm... not a super fan of rhombus' emphasis on metaprogramming beyond supporting the language itself though.