Live data from Hacker News

Beautiful Racket v1.0

beautifulracket.com

11–20 of 60 posts

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#11
There's a lot to like about racket. The cross-referential documentation is amazing - thanks to Scribble built in as a documentation language. Another thing which makes it super fun to write is module+ - the ability to interleave a submodule within another module. Writing unit tests in line with what they're testing is a great way to provide examples of what a function does.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#13
> I con­cede that the thump­ing noise is bet­ter for you with a paper­back. But oth­er­wise, the web-based book is bet­ter for every­one.

The author's style seems to be very opinionated and blunt, and I appreciate that, but a web-based book is not better for me.

The reasons listed are great examples of the benefits of web-based books, but I do not find web-based books readable.

I read the FAQ, and I get it: he's not releasing a paper version. Ever. I may power through it on a screen, someday, if it is well-received.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#14
post #2

I'd just like to say that I admire Matthew Butterick's creative experimentation with business models for web publishing and absolutely adore Practical Typography to the extent that I've purchased several of his fonts and intend to purchase Beautiful Racket as well. It can be hard to imagine that there's a world for type design on computers outside the formulaic mundanity and advertisement-laden nature of the rest of…

I don't know. It looks non-functional and ugly to me.

https://i.imgur.com/DmPKqhM.png

This is in contrast to something like nytimes.com which is really well designed.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#15
post #4

Cool. I'm always game for a good discussion of DSL's and Lisp (Racket). But what struck me immediately was the quality of the "Why Lisp Why Racket" essay. This is probably the most compelling that I've seen as it gets specific and cites near-term benefits – not just the elitist "it's good for you" or "it'll make you smarter" stuff. Nicely done.

Why Racket? Why Lisp?

http://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#16
post #4

Cool. I'm always game for a good discussion of DSL's and Lisp (Racket). But what struck me immediately was the quality of the "Why Lisp Why Racket" essay. This is probably the most compelling that I've seen as it gets specific and cites near-term benefits – not just the elitist "it's good for you" or "it'll make you smarter" stuff. Nicely done.

Thanks for recommending that essay. Reading through it I found myself first agreeing, every other attempt sings about Lisp's wonders without showing you the what/why/how, only woo. Then, here I was halfway through this essay also not yet knowing what the fuzz is about, and when the author finally gets around to it I end up not really sold on it. I have given Racket and CL my time before only to end giving up, not having found "enlightenment" or even the motivation to keep at it. Another day, with more free time I expect I'll give Beautiful Racket also a try.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#18
post #9

I'm an intermediate scheme programmer (experienced in C, Python, etc), and one thing I really didn't like about R6RS in general, and Racket in particular, is the amount of bloat. I'm a staunch minimalist and one of the things that appealed to me learning scheme for the first time was the minimalism of the language syntax. Then I started learning about Racket (and Clojure) and realized they give you the kitchen sink o…

First, a small defense of Racket. Racket has a small core relative to its apparent size; most of the bloat is in optional library code. All the fancy special forms for pattern matching, classes, contracts, etc are just optional macros from the libraries, and everything eventually expands down into this rather small core language:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/syntax-model.html#%28...

The default `#lang racket` is a big batteries-included language including all that stuff, but the core `#lang racket/base` isn't very big. I always program in `#lang racket/base` and pull in just the libraries I need. For me the most beautiful part of Racket is this juxtaposition of a small core language and a big extended language implemented through a standard library of macros.

You can also install a distribution of Racket that leaves out bloat like DrRacket, Slideshow and the teaching language packages from the release variants page: https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/6.8/

As to your question, Beautiful Racket appears largely a guide to the language extensibility features that are specific to Racket and not shared by other Scheme systems like Chibi. Things like the `#lang` system, lexer library, and syntax highlighting integration in DrRacket. I imagine you'd get the most benefit out of it by working through it in Racket, and subsequently thinking about how to apply the ideas in other systems like Chibi.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#20
post #2

I'd just like to say that I admire Matthew Butterick's creative experimentation with business models for web publishing and absolutely adore Practical Typography to the extent that I've purchased several of his fonts and intend to purchase Beautiful Racket as well. It can be hard to imagine that there's a world for type design on computers outside the formulaic mundanity and advertisement-laden nature of the rest of…

I don't know. It looks non-functional and ugly to me. https://i.imgur.com/DmPKqhM.png This is in contrast to something like nytimes.com which is really well designed.

Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN
Post reply on HN