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Beautiful Racket v1.0

beautifulracket.com

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Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#31

Post by Veen »

simonh wrote: post #27
e12e wrote: post #24

Looks like an interesting book. And, on my surface pro, it's pretty. It's not very readable, as it is only dark-on-light, high contrast -- I prefer "night mode" for reading long-form. And it's unreadable on my Android device (both Firefox and Chrome), due not being a responsive design - the text is simply too small to read. For comparison I've read a handful of books on my Android - both epub and Kindle. A minimal te…

It's only readable on my iPhone because it's a 6+, on anything smaller it would be infuriating and it's not ideal for me anyway. Not only that but in 'reader mode' the formatting is completely wrecked such the the content actually disappears. This is all a shame because my preferred way to read something like this is on a mobile device, although I suppose it could be semi-deliberate to nudge you towards buying. Edit:…

For some reason, Butterick is averse to both making a PDF available and to responsive design. Perhaps — as a typographer and book designer — he prefers to control how the layout looks even if it means it looks bad on smaller screens.

From the FAQ:

* Will you ever release this book as a PDF or e-book? No.

* Do you plan to opti­mize this book for mobile? No.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#32

Post by barrkel »

rbjorklin wrote: post #21
mod wrote: post #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…

Have you considered an eReader such as the Amazon Paperwhite?

I've found linear navigation to be a bit of a blocker with e-readers; they're great for narrative, but with something more reference-like, you often need to hop back and forth and the interface is more limiting.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#33

Post by e12e »

Veen wrote: post #31
simonh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only readable on my iPhone because it's a 6+, on anything smaller it would be infuriating and it's not ideal for me anyway. Not only that but in 'reader mode' the formatting is completely wrecked such the the content actually disappears. This is all a shame because my preferred way to read something like this is on a mobile device, although I suppose it could be semi-deliberate to nudge you towards buying. Edit:…

For some reason, Butterick is averse to both making a PDF available and to responsive design. Perhaps — as a typographer and book designer — he prefers to control how the layout looks even if it means it looks bad on smaller screens. From the FAQ: * Will you ever release this book as a PDF or e-book? No. * Do you plan to opti­mize this book for mobile? No.

I could care less for a PDF - but epub is a pretty useful format for actually reading a book. And a Kindle book is also rather nice (mostly due to kindle syncing location in the books across devices etc - I would prefer to buy ebooks without the DRM, as there's the worry one will lose access for various technical or business reasons).

And I'd like an offline copy - I do sometimes read in places without Internet access.

Without any of these - I'd be hard-pressed to buy - even if the content is excellent.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#34

Post by JimmyM »

tremendo wrote: post #16
untangle wrote: 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 hav…

So glad to see him articulate what I've always felt about x-exprs.

It often gets overlooked because we all understandably want to hype something in a language that's really cool, original, abstract or otherwise reflects well on us. But being able to intuitively, iteratively and rapidly work on XML & HTML files is lush, and the IDE with built-in REPL is just gravy for this purpose.

Even if working on XML and HTML files is boring and a technically solved problem in most languages, it feels better in Racket to me, and the essay did explain why it feels better.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#35

Post by tonyedgecombe »

GavinMcG wrote: post #15
untangle wrote: 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

Updated version: http://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.html

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#36

Post by dahauns »

untangle wrote: 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.

Dunno...I know the style is intentionaly and maybe I'm just not the right target audience for these kinds of essay, but I find this kind of "storytelling" style incredibly longwinded, verbose and actually rather annoying.

It's quite ironic that he needs 24 (in words: twenty-four) paragraphs to get to the first concrete answer to the title question: expressiveness.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#37

Post by kaushalmodi »

untangle wrote: 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.

Any one using Emacs and tweaking it using elisp might also agree on the "Why Lisp?". In short, everything is an expression in Lisp languages -- Racket, Elisp, .. So one just codes as they think; they don't have to write separate statements to appease the language syntax.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#38

Post by rnikander »

Has anyone used Racket for a long running application server? Last I remember it did not have native threads (ie, it could only use one core), and I don't know about it's reliability compared to something like the JVM.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#39

Post by panglott »

throwaway399 wrote: post #14
jolux wrote: 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.

The layout is good, but the "grey on light grey" thing is not very visually accessible.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#40

Post by atgc »

raspasov wrote: post #30

Question for someone experienced with Racket: does Racket offer immutable/persistent data structures?

I'm not sure about persistence, but it definitely has immutable data structures. See e.g. the docs on hash tables: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/hashtables.html

As mentioned in the comments here, Racket's documentation is wonderful. I've yet to come across a better mix of technical reference, guiding narrative and a wealth of usage examples.

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