Viewing profile — shriramkmurthi

I agree! We're acutely conscious of it. This is precisely where, as you note, the education focus puts our resources elsewhere. Once those things settle down, this is something we'…

Good question! The compiler is definitely the main application that's been written. We're not aware of any standalone Pyret applications on the order of more than a few KLOC, but t…

I'm really delighted to hear your boss's daughter is having so much fun. That's a great outcome. I don't expect everyone using Pyret to turn into a professional programmer. In fact…

Good question re. Web Assembly. The problem is we need much more than tail calls. Just as important is deep stacks, to enable a _functional_ style of “functional programming”. And …

Thanks. This is where our “education first” emphasis comes in. I'd like that too, but it's just not our most critical need. Since it can be run on top of Node from a shell, what it…

We started out as a Racket `#lang`. That is in principle always an option. However: the in-browser support is non-negotiable. We have many users in schools, which have very locked-…

No. I think the best illustration is the continuation-based Web programming work we did several years ago: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/khmgpf... If you do…

There's absolutely nothing in Pyret forcing you to write `where` blocks with immediate tests. You can also put your tests in a `check` block, which can float anywhere, and in anoth…

The official AE site is here: http://www.artifact-eval.org/ . It details the process and the design behind it. People who want to understand the philosophy are welcome to contact m…

The continuation-based libraries are the simplest, easiest, quickest way to get a program off the ground. They make interactive Web programming just as easy as writing “scanf” or i…

Racket and Python aren't even remotely comparable as languages. Python is a far less sophisticated language with far richer libraries, and Racket is vice versa.

Whalesong is moribund for now. The Pyret intermediate language is actually a really good compilation target for functional languages. The problem is that Racket has a lot more stuf…

Congrats on the job! We've already compiled a very good chunk of Racket to JS. It's called Whalesong ( http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/yk-wha... ). The initia…

By the way: Racket is not at all for "programming basics only". Racket, the language, is as rich a programming language as you'd like. Even the Racket team's pedagogy is wide-rangi…

Calling out and criticism is fine! But to answer your question: for the foreseeable future, our "metal" is JavaScript, so that's what we will be finding ways to expose. We have alr…

The platform is a pretty big difference. One of the major problems we run into in the education space is that many schools _cannot_ install any new software. Running on the browser…

Look at how we've structured the semantics of JavaScript, Python, etc. (E.g.: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pclpk-... , http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications…

Scribble is another great example. It's amazing in its own right, and by being embedded into Racket, gets all the Racket benefits: for instance, separate compilation! (Thirty years…

This is a criticism of Lisp-based DSLs but not of Racket-based DSLs. Racket actively enables you to impose different, non-parenthetical surface syntaxes on the DSL. It is not a "th…

Absolutely. To be honest, we don't want Pyret to stay in the "education cellar" forever. But, we need a set of coherent design constraints, and education is a good one because it p…

Go with Chrome, Safari, or IE 10 for now. There's a very complicated interaction with how Firefox handles the stack.

Wow, thanks. I passed this remark on to the rest of the team. Totally made our day!

Thanks for the kind comments. Sorry to hear about the crash, etc. We haven't gotten many reports about this; if you could file a bug report the next time ( https://github.com/brown…

It's awesome in its own way. Our emphasis was on • allowing arbitrarily deep call stacks (e.g., deep recursion) • allowing computation to be interrupted • turning async interfaces …