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Pollen: the book is a program

docs.racket-lang.org

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Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#91

Post by oxryly1 »

tudelo wrote: post #62
oxryly1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I spent many years doing that for games. AMA.

That's awesome. Do you think this is still a viable career? I know very little about what sort of DSL you would make for games, what would they even cover? map gen? Also, why Racket?

I think it'd be useful to learn, but nobody in the industry will hire you specifically to work in Racket.

We used DSLs on top of a data pipeline to create things like particle effects, animations, sound, and scripting.

We chose Racket because it seemed to be the best supported open source scheme implementation at the time I started working on this system (back in 2005).

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#92

Post by SwellJoe »

oxryly1 wrote: post #90
SwellJoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how'd it turn out? Did you ship any games?

Yes, the "Uncharted" series and "The Last of Us". Our team built a large system in Racket that built all kinds of data for the game. The front end could and often did have many layers of DSLs using Racket syntax macros. Overall it enabled us to do many things that would have required lots of specialized tools. The downsides were things like people ramping up on editing s-expressions in text files and lots of gotchas…

Well, that wasn't the answer I expected! Super cool, I wouldn't have guessed any AAA titles were using a Lisp/Scheme heavily in their toolchain (but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the game industry).

I'm fascinated by procedural generation and constrained randomness in games, and I'd think something like Racket would be a fun choice for that. Do you reckon you'd make the same choice if you were starting today?

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#93

Post by Semiapies »

jacobolus wrote: post #24
Semiapies wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly fine if and only if you're on a Mac . It gets bad on every other platform.

If you actually need to use this seriously there are ways of customizing keyboard layouts and text input on every platform and every reasonable text editor.

Sure, but it's absurd to have to set up custom text entry for an unusual character just to use a programming language. Especially when every other template language manages to do so with characters I don't have to customize my text editor to simply type.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#94

Post by alew1 »

xrayspec wrote: post #86
alew1 wrote: post #85

I'm a CS teacher and use Pollen to write my assignments (sample: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9DAZWpkQIDuUlA4SU5lcHItRDg... ). It allows me to type assignments as fast as I can think them, in a specialized mark-up language for exactly the type of assignments I give. I can then apply various post-processing operations (like doing syntax highlighting, converting straight quotation marks to curly but not when insid…

This is great. I would love to see the source for this. Would you consider posting it?

Thanks! Happy to :-) Here's the code for this assignment, as well as the pollen.rkt and HTML template/CSS files. (Disclaimer: this was written as code to get something done, not for others to see, so it's not always pretty!)

https://gist.github.com/alex-lew/883ee382a697b39f0f6b49561a0...

By the way, I use Atom, which has an excellent Pollen plugin, to write. Typing '@' then pressing tab turns into ◊{}, with the cursor between the lozenge and the braces.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#95

Post by Tehnix »

wodenokoto wrote: post #27
Tehnix wrote: post #6

Hmm, is there a cheatsheet or crash course for it? Not particularly interested in reading a book just to get my editing game on. Just throw me in the deep water with the basics, and then I'll jump around to what I need. Would consider using this instead of LaTeX for my thesis, but not so much if the time investment is too much.

Markdown to Latex (via pandoc) might be a better option if you don't want to write/compose in latex.

Great suggestion! I'm gonna see if I can get a template set up to use :)

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#96

Post by wodenokoto »

Tehnix wrote: post #95
wodenokoto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown to Latex (via pandoc) might be a better option if you don't want to write/compose in latex.

Great suggestion! I'm gonna see if I can get a template set up to use :)

If I were to do my thesis all over, I would definitely look at how these people use plaintext/markdown to get things done.

http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/plain-text-citations.html

https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/sustainable-authors...

Good luck!

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#97

Post by tonyg »

tonyg wrote: post #75
kuschku wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned, both are possible, but (λ ...) is strictly preferred.

This is certainly not the case. Some, but by no means all, of the core maintainers prefer the unicode glyph, but the vast majority of the code uses a spelled-out lambda. In my current checkout of the codebase, I see the following: ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ ag lambda **/*.rkt | wc -l 1041 ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ ag λ **/*.rkt | wc -l 163 Note also consistent usage of spelled-out lambda in the Racket styl…

I made a mistake, believing that `ag` could handle extended glob syntax. The real numbers are:

    ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ find . -iname '*.rkt' | xargs ag lambda | wc -l
    33589

    ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ find . -iname '*.rkt' | xargs ag λ | wc -l
    16722
Glyph λ is more common than I thought, but still heavily outnumbered by spelled-out lambda.
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