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Racket v7.2

blog.racket-lang.org

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11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Racket v7.2

#11

Post by seertaak »

Racket is such a cool project. I keep telling myself I'll find the time to do something serious with it, but I never get around to it.

One minor bit of criticism - would be it be so hard/expensive to hire a designer to do some minor touching up of the DrRacket GUI? It looks like a toy, and the icons didn't even look good in 1998.

I'll balance this criticism with the remark that any language/platform that manages to a) add, ex-post, a type system, b) fix the Gordian knot of modules and macros, and c) has the audacity (combined, curiously, with humility) to just swap out the entire backend to eek out more performance, deserves my respect. In addition both Flatt and Tobin-Hochstadt give excellent presentations where it's impossible not to notice their passion for Racket. They're definitely among my nerd heroes right now.

Re: Racket v7.2

#13

Post by jashmatthews »

pritambaral wrote: post #9
jashmatthews wrote: post #2

Matthew Flatt did an excellent talk "Incremental Parallelization of Dynamic Languages" on Racket https://air.mozilla.org/incremental-parallelization-of-dynam... There's a lot of useful discussion in here about parallelism which also applies to Ruby, Python, Lua etc.

Is this video available without a login?

Not that I've seen but there's a paper: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/dls11-tsffd.pdf

Re: Racket v7.2

#14

Post by dhuramas »

seertaak wrote: post #11

Racket is such a cool project. I keep telling myself I'll find the time to do something serious with it, but I never get around to it. One minor bit of criticism - would be it be so hard/expensive to hire a designer to do some minor touching up of the DrRacket GUI? It looks like a toy, and the icons didn't even look good in 1998. I'll balance this criticism with the remark that any language/platform that manages to a…

python comes with IDLE. Which looks dated w.r.t current IDEs. I guess for most languages, stability is the key - changing UI also means maintaining two different UIs(the old and the new)- that time could probably be better spent on language features.

Re: Racket v7.2

#15

Post by yorwba »

pritambaral wrote: post #9
jashmatthews wrote: post #2

Matthew Flatt did an excellent talk "Incremental Parallelization of Dynamic Languages" on Racket https://air.mozilla.org/incremental-parallelization-of-dynam... There's a lot of useful discussion in here about parallelism which also applies to Ruby, Python, Lua etc.

Is this video available without a login?

Using Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin enabled, I was redirected to some "onlinexperiences.com" site that displayed "System Check" and then a constantly growing number of lines containing only "Browser".

Then I tried the stock Android Browser and it passed the browser check, but redirected to a login page.

Going back to Firefox and disabling uBlock Origin, I was able to access a description of the talk and the video itself. So I conclude that the video is available without login, but you have to use Firefox and allow yourself to be tracked.

Pretty grating "online experience" for something hosted on a mozilla.org subdomain.

Edit: the video file is here: https://airmo-7feeef12f503ef5d.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/02/06/4...

Re: Racket v7.2

#16

Post by jnbiche »

dhuramas wrote: post #14
seertaak wrote: post #11

Racket is such a cool project. I keep telling myself I'll find the time to do something serious with it, but I never get around to it. One minor bit of criticism - would be it be so hard/expensive to hire a designer to do some minor touching up of the DrRacket GUI? It looks like a toy, and the icons didn't even look good in 1998. I'll balance this criticism with the remark that any language/platform that manages to a…

python comes with IDLE. Which looks dated w.r.t current IDEs. I guess for most languages, stability is the key - changing UI also means maintaining two different UIs(the old and the new)- that time could probably be better spent on language features.

> changing UI also means maintaining two different UIs(the old and the new)-

Why would you need to maintain the old UI? Backwards compatibility isn't an issue, since no one is screenscraping and doing image recognition to interact with the UI.

Besides, what we're discussing are relatively minor changes to update appearance, such as different font, color scheme, graphics assets, etc. No significant changes wrt UX--with how the user interacts with the program.

Re: Racket v7.2

#17

Post by lettergram »

I’ve used Racket in the past. Personally, I’d still never use it for production because the learning curve is fairly steep AND as this post highlights - there are still bugs being worked out in basic features like “set”.

However, overall I like the language. So, overtime I think it’ll have its day in the sun.

Re: Racket v7.2

#18

Post by soegaard »

lettergram wrote: post #17

I’ve used Racket in the past. Personally, I’d still never use it for production because the learning curve is fairly steep AND as this post highlights - there are still bugs being worked out in basic features like “set”. However, overall I like the language. So, overtime I think it’ll have its day in the sun.

> there are still bugs being worked out in basic features like “set”.

You are misreading the release notes.

What was fixed is a Redex model (a tool used in semantics to model computer languages). A change to the modeling of `set!` (assignment) was made. It has no impact on Racket itself.

Re: Racket v7.2

#19

Post by maxiepoo »

soegaard wrote: post #18
lettergram wrote: post #17

I’ve used Racket in the past. Personally, I’d still never use it for production because the learning curve is fairly steep AND as this post highlights - there are still bugs being worked out in basic features like “set”. However, overall I like the language. So, overtime I think it’ll have its day in the sun.

> there are still bugs being worked out in basic features like “set”. You are misreading the release notes. What was fixed is a Redex model (a tool used in semantics to model computer languages). A change to the modeling of `set!` (assignment) was made. It has no impact on Racket itself.

Really? Then as written it's very misleading "led to some bug fixes in Racket’s implementation of letrec and set!."

Re: Racket v7.2

#20

Post by ethelward »

kumarvvr wrote: post #4

Does anyone use this in production? Will this be a good platform to develop a DSL for a web app?

I am not sure one would count it as “production”. But I am pretty fond of Racket whenever I want to develop a quick-and-dirty tool for one of the persons in my lab.

The performances are meh (correct for a script language, but not much), the standard library is very large, it is portable, the integrated GUI and plotting facilities are absolutely priceless, and the ability to generate a fat ELF/.exe/.app for all of the three platforms is priceless.

Sure, distributing a 100MB executable is not something I would envision for a largely distributed software, but when hacking up (on Linux) a quick GUI tool for my lab colleague (on Windows), the advantages more than compensate for the drawbacks.

And I like LISP/Scheme languages, but that's subjective.

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