5 ms·

Dr. Racket is one hell of a development environment. The things we could do if we were using Scheme+Racket instead of Java+Eclipse ...

by _pmf_ 14y ago

nnq 14y ago
Racket is a Scheme dialects that adds quite a lot to vanilla scheme as far as I know. The racket IDE is not praised that much and the lispers/schemers I know prefer Emacs/SLIME (though I believe you that it's better than Eclipse). ...so saying "Scheme+Racket vs Java+Eclipse" is really comparing apples to pineapples :) (maybe Clojure+Lighttable is closer to what you'd mean...)
- callmecosmas 14y ago
  I'm a grad student that works in Racket and fwiw I find that I prefer emacs for editing but DrRacket for testing and debugging. It has great tools for documentation, locating errors and macro expansion and of course it all works out of the box. I also use Geiser, but I've found it buggy and unreliable (including instantly shutting down my OSX machine if I tell emacs to kill it when I quit, plus I still haven't figured out how to limit its memory consumption).
- p4bl0 14y ago
  Just to be nitpicky, Racket is not a Scheme dialect (hence the name changing from PLT Scheme to Racket a few years ago (already!)). It's not because it not only adds a lot to Scheme but also has somewhat important differences. For instance, `cons` pairs are immutable in Racket: there's no `set-car!` or `set-cdr!` as in Scheme (you can have mutable cons pair using `mcons`, `set-mcar!`, and `set-mcdr!` though). Also the macro systems that Racket uses (`syntax-parse` and co) is quite more advanced than the current Scheme rNrs one.
  - moron4hire 14y ago
    Well, #lang racket is not scheme, but one can run rnrs in the racket runtime. There are many languages that run on the racket runtime.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      IIRC, Arc/HN runs on mzscheme because they rely on mutable cons cells that newer versions (racket) don't provide. Could they run under new rackets by just telling racket to use a proper scheme?
      - moron4hire 14y ago
        There is an mzscheme language mode, but it specifically does not include set-car! and set-cdr!.
      - jeapostrophe 14y ago
        As a Racket author, I can tell you that we provided them with a hack to enable mutation on arbitrary conses, so they can upgrade whenever they wish, and I don't know whether they have or not.
moron4hire 14y ago
Why don't you? It's easy enough to pick up. I was doing C# for quite a long time (and actually liking it), and just decided to start doing Racket. I've got a project going right now that is 100% custom racket. Once you get the macros down, the code flies. It's pretty amazing.
- nnq 14y ago
  You have a client project in Racket? Cool! Care to share what area / what are you using it for?
  - moron4hire 14y ago
    Well, I can only share a little. It's a web app built around a large, temporal knowledge base, with a proprietary data analytics engine that we develop in-house. The engine generates metrics and alerts that give our users decision-making insights. Gads, this sounds like the worst shit-head MBA project ever, but there is a lot I'm leaving out. In the process, it's also a major test bench for a number of development tools we're building. This is where Racket pays dividends: it has a lot of the simple web-dev stuff in a good-enough state to get you off the ground fast, but doesn't pin you down to any one thing, leaving you wide open to rip out and replace whatever you want. Don't like how the HTML templating engine works? If you're good at macros (and Racket's macros are relatively easy), it's a simple job to roll your own. We've got a data comprehension system that has its own pseudo-byte code that treats SQL like a machine-language in need of a VM that gives us a lot of static checking of our queries. We have a migration system that can rebuild the schema and restore data as easy as compiling your application, with reversible data translations between schema versions (so that we often do. Setting up a new developer-machine/test-environment/culster-node/what-have-you is a snap). Some of this stuff would have been damn costly to not just build without Racket's macros, I shudder to think what the changes we've had to make along the way would have been like. Racket lets us take DRY to the extreme. Almost nothing in this project has been difficult to change, or at least no more difficult than the initial effort to develop it, because there is almost never a reason to change the interface to anything, and if it does need changing, the human-readable-code level has so few interaction points it's trivial to change interfaces. Hell, even in the case where a lot of interface changes would be necessary, we could probably just write a Racket program to chop up the S-expressions for us. The mathematics library is also very good, providing a lot of intuitive, high-performance primitives that fit our data crunching needs. And we're currently investigating using the Prolog-like Datalog language mode And the performance is extremely good, especially if you're coming from the Python/PHP/Ruby world. I find it as expressive as Python (actually, translating Python programs is nearly 1-to-1) but with performance more like static C#. The optimizer is very good and there is a typed version of Racket that gets optimized even more. Yeah, you should use Racket even if you don't plan on learning macros, because it's as easy as Python and its a lot faster. All along the way. Graphics primitives: standard library feature. Parallel code: super-simple, very solid, and built in. Linear algebra: very solid, very easy to use (almost as easy as basic primitives) and again, built in. Distributed package management: built-in, it's part of the regular import syntax. Racket-to-JavaScript translator: well, not quite built in yet, but the package manager might as well let you treat it as so. Cross-platform compatibility: haven't had a single issue getting people on Linux, OS X, and Windows up and running with development yet. If you've ever tried getting Scala or Clojure or Ruby setup on your own, Racket blows them out of the water. I'm not terrible certain the fundamental premise of the project is sound, but at the end of the year we're going to have something of value on our hands, whether it's the raw data of the knowledge base or the development tools. Racket doesn't just let us build proof-of-concepts fast, it lets us expand them into heavy-lifting mode pretty quick, too.

Dr. Racket is one hell of a development environment. The things we could do if we were using Scheme+Racket instead of Java+Eclipse ...

by _pmf_ 14y ago

Dr. Racket is one hell of a development environment. The things we could do if we were using Scheme+Racket instead of Java+Eclipse ...

nnq 14y ago

Racket is a Scheme dialects that adds quite a lot to vanilla scheme as far as I know. The racket IDE is not praised that much and the lispers/schemers I know prefer Emacs/SLIME (though I believe you that it's better than Eclipse). ...so saying "Scheme+Racket vs Java+Eclipse" is really comparing apples to pineapples :) (maybe Clojure+Lighttable is closer to what you'd mean...)

callmecosmas 14y ago
I'm a grad student that works in Racket and fwiw I find that I prefer emacs for editing but DrRacket for testing and debugging. It has great tools for documentation, locating errors and macro expansion and of course it all works out of the box. I also use Geiser, but I've found it buggy and unreliable (including instantly shutting down my OSX machine if I tell emacs to kill it when I quit, plus I still haven't figured out how to limit its memory consumption).
p4bl0 14y ago
Just to be nitpicky, Racket is not a Scheme dialect (hence the name changing from PLT Scheme to Racket a few years ago (already!)). It's not because it not only adds a lot to Scheme but also has somewhat important differences. For instance, `cons` pairs are immutable in Racket: there's no `set-car!` or `set-cdr!` as in Scheme (you can have mutable cons pair using `mcons`, `set-mcar!`, and `set-mcdr!` though). Also the macro systems that Racket uses (`syntax-parse` and co) is quite more advanced than the current Scheme rNrs one.
- moron4hire 14y ago
  Well, #lang racket is not scheme, but one can run rnrs in the racket runtime. There are many languages that run on the racket runtime.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    IIRC, Arc/HN runs on mzscheme because they rely on mutable cons cells that newer versions (racket) don't provide. Could they run under new rackets by just telling racket to use a proper scheme?
    - moron4hire 14y ago
      There is an mzscheme language mode, but it specifically does not include set-car! and set-cdr!.
    - jeapostrophe 14y ago
      As a Racket author, I can tell you that we provided them with a hack to enable mutation on arbitrary conses, so they can upgrade whenever they wish, and I don't know whether they have or not.

moron4hire 14y ago

Why don't you? It's easy enough to pick up. I was doing C# for quite a long time (and actually liking it), and just decided to start doing Racket. I've got a project going right now that is 100% custom racket. Once you get the macros down, the code flies. It's pretty amazing.

nnq 14y ago
You have a client project in Racket? Cool! Care to share what area / what are you using it for?
- moron4hire 14y ago
  Well, I can only share a little. It's a web app built around a large, temporal knowledge base, with a proprietary data analytics engine that we develop in-house. The engine generates metrics and alerts that give our users decision-making insights. Gads, this sounds like the worst shit-head MBA project ever, but there is a lot I'm leaving out. In the process, it's also a major test bench for a number of development tools we're building. This is where Racket pays dividends: it has a lot of the simple web-dev stuff in a good-enough state to get you off the ground fast, but doesn't pin you down to any one thing, leaving you wide open to rip out and replace whatever you want. Don't like how the HTML templating engine works? If you're good at macros (and Racket's macros are relatively easy), it's a simple job to roll your own. We've got a data comprehension system that has its own pseudo-byte code that treats SQL like a machine-language in need of a VM that gives us a lot of static checking of our queries. We have a migration system that can rebuild the schema and restore data as easy as compiling your application, with reversible data translations between schema versions (so that we often do. Setting up a new developer-machine/test-environment/culster-node/what-have-you is a snap). Some of this stuff would have been damn costly to not just build without Racket's macros, I shudder to think what the changes we've had to make along the way would have been like. Racket lets us take DRY to the extreme. Almost nothing in this project has been difficult to change, or at least no more difficult than the initial effort to develop it, because there is almost never a reason to change the interface to anything, and if it does need changing, the human-readable-code level has so few interaction points it's trivial to change interfaces. Hell, even in the case where a lot of interface changes would be necessary, we could probably just write a Racket program to chop up the S-expressions for us. The mathematics library is also very good, providing a lot of intuitive, high-performance primitives that fit our data crunching needs. And we're currently investigating using the Prolog-like Datalog language mode And the performance is extremely good, especially if you're coming from the Python/PHP/Ruby world. I find it as expressive as Python (actually, translating Python programs is nearly 1-to-1) but with performance more like static C#. The optimizer is very good and there is a typed version of Racket that gets optimized even more. Yeah, you should use Racket even if you don't plan on learning macros, because it's as easy as Python and its a lot faster. All along the way. Graphics primitives: standard library feature. Parallel code: super-simple, very solid, and built in. Linear algebra: very solid, very easy to use (almost as easy as basic primitives) and again, built in. Distributed package management: built-in, it's part of the regular import syntax. Racket-to-JavaScript translator: well, not quite built in yet, but the package manager might as well let you treat it as so. Cross-platform compatibility: haven't had a single issue getting people on Linux, OS X, and Windows up and running with development yet. If you've ever tried getting Scala or Clojure or Ruby setup on your own, Racket blows them out of the water. I'm not terrible certain the fundamental premise of the project is sound, but at the end of the year we're going to have something of value on our hands, whether it's the raw data of the knowledge base or the development tools. Racket doesn't just let us build proof-of-concepts fast, it lets us expand them into heavy-lifting mode pretty quick, too.