Yeah, because those like me who mooch off of the free and open brilliance of Racket (I mean, except for paying for a copy of Realm of Racket, but that is indire

Yeah, because those like me who mooch off of the free and open brilliance of Racket (I mean, except for paying for a copy of Realm of Racket, but that is indirect; the author has a Scheme/Lisp crush like me, but we all know that goes back to community enthusiasts and not Racket itself) get to write blog posts on the official blog while we navel gaze. You clearly contribute enough to talk semi-officially even, so thank you for your work. :-) Jokes aside, maybe I am just conflating you academic creds with other NEU/Brown people, but maybe it is just the blog post. Your last name reminded me of Racket when I saw it; not sure why though. Kudos to your group, or just you personally, for recommending Chromium, and NOT Chrome. I work for a university IT department, and our inventory confirms even after lecturing co-workers, I am the only one to have installed it on Windows laptops, or even Mac or Linux if you can believe the latter. Mostly everyone has no idea you can download the FLOSS fork of Chrome without the nasty proprietary bits. In the future, it would be cool to see you guys package a more focused IDE with the rage, node-webkit or nw.js or whatever is called now. You guys seem like a great example of a lang that could shine here, much like Dr. Racket is a pretty wonderful example of the robustness of Racket (although I still prefer Geiser myself). I also see shriramkmurthi talks about university requirements about minimal install and configuration overhead. This is a great, if not just good, thing. Again, as a university IT guy thank you. However, I still have mixed feelings. I worked for kids in a very spoiled institution with expensive new laptops, complete with full admin control for students. I get my fair share of novice programmers install a full Stata stack for the econometrics class, and along with professors, hose a 4GB or 8GB RAM laptop which "needs more drive space and RAM because my 1GB CSV dataset is so big." We tell them to write tighter code and they are incensed (seriously had students demand a more expensive version because one version of Stata had an arbitrary limit of variables in a given program, IIRC correctly, and the group of students and professors were told to us less variables, less than 60,000! I cannot imagine production distributed systems code needing that many, haha). So, I bring up that last anecdote as a warning. I would love to help any way I can. Damned with compiled binary LLVM and Java toolchains that need admin privs and 10GB of space for library source and various dependencies, also damned with in-browser JS bootstrapped compilers that sit on an increasingly over-generalized OS in an OS. How do you plan to handle the abstractions moving further and further away from the metal? I assume this is to teach programming basics only, right? Like Racket is, kind of? Do you worry about pushing this farther down into systems programming, or are you staying focused? I do not intend to call out or criticize one way or the other, just curious to pick your brains.