I feel like there's some paragraphs missing in this post between "I'm concerned the change won't help grow the community" and "I'll no longer learn or have fun in this community". He doesn't explicitly say how he expects his relationship with Racket to change, or why. He's implying, though not even outright stating, that he's distancing from Racket because of Matthew Flatt's proposal. That's begging for further explanation. Mere proposals don't warrant this sort of reaction. Racket is hardly a stranger to radical proposals. What's going on behind the scenes that's so serious as to warrant a post like this? Why, in short, the vagueposting drama?
Future of Racket
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Future of Racket
#32The mailing list traffic on this topic took the wind out of my sails for wanting to spend my tinker time in Racket. On the one hand, it’s probably overreacting for me to throw in the towel on Racket at just the suggestion of this change. On the other hand, part of what makes me interested in writing Racket for projects where I have broad latitude is the sense that I’m both using an exciting technology, and a technolo…
Please don't be turned off by the recent commotion. (I'm sorry some of the commotion that might've discouraged you was by me.) Commotion happens because people care about Racket, and there are reasons they care. Racket actually has a couple-decade history of very good stability, other than a couple oopses that might've helped prompt the current attempt at greater community involvement in decisions. The history is too…
No, to be clear, the commotion that has me concerned about Racket’s future is the substance of the proposal that was signaled on the list, not any sort of flamewar fatigue. One of the nice things about the Racket community is how thoughtful and earnest people are. I also tend to view your commentary as reasoned and agreeable, so no apologies needed!
To me, I’m just not that excited about the “maybe direction.” I guess I’m one of the parentheses clutchers who loves parediting in emacs. I’m sure the transition toward some other syntax will be cautious and careful, and that the resulting preferred #lang will be a fine one.
It just sounds like the center of mass for the Racket community won’t be quite what I was looking for when I came to Racket. I’ve got plenty of experience in at least one language, R, that started as a Scheme and then syntaxed itself to something less than Scheme (the language I mean, not the libraries—I'd kill for a #lang racket with R’s libraries).
Maybe Racket2 will be the bland syntax that succeeds in not obscuring the Music of the Spheres. If anyone can do it, this community will. On the other hand, I’ve got a healthy skepticism, uninformed by any deep understanding of the issues. I’m not sure what the benefits of sticking it out to see are.
The proposed change has anti-network effects in that Greg is already signaled his departure, and I’d already stopped reaching for Racket as the answer to “what lisp should I learn?” I simply don’t have a good answer to that question where I felt like I did a month or so ago.
But I’d be disappointed if Racket changed direction based on opinions of people like me. It’s not like I have any grand contributions to the community that are going away! I’m a dilettante who writes a little bit of Racket to scratch a personal itch once in a while. My primary takeaway from my one in-person RacketCon (Seattle) was, “woah, I don’t understand anything but these people are smaaaart.” I am not the right person to cater a language to.
Re: Future of Racket
#33The mailing list traffic on this topic took the wind out of my sails for wanting to spend my tinker time in Racket. On the one hand, it’s probably overreacting for me to throw in the towel on Racket at just the suggestion of this change. On the other hand, part of what makes me interested in writing Racket for projects where I have broad latitude is the sense that I’m both using an exciting technology, and a technolo…
For pedagogical potential Python and Julia also competes against Racket due to connection to the data science ecosystem.
Re: Future of Racket
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't be turned off by the recent commotion. (I'm sorry some of the commotion that might've discouraged you was by me.) Commotion happens because people care about Racket, and there are reasons they care. Racket actually has a couple-decade history of very good stability, other than a couple oopses that might've helped prompt the current attempt at greater community involvement in decisions. The history is too…
No, to be clear, the commotion that has me concerned about Racket’s future is the substance of the proposal that was signaled on the list, not any sort of flamewar fatigue. One of the nice things about the Racket community is how thoughtful and earnest people are. I also tend to view your commentary as reasoned and agreeable, so no apologies needed! To me, I’m just not that excited about the “maybe direction.” I gues…
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. The Racket commmunity has a lot of people using it on the side, like you do, and your interests and contributions matter. I've been in that category myself lately.
If you were drawn to Racket, but want to look around a bit, there are a few other Schemes I find especially interesting, including: Guile, Chicken, Gambit, and Scheme48. Guile is in pre-release of some nice new JIT work, including instant startup from native code caches, and has an active community. If the bulk of your code can be written in RnRS, and you avoid mutating lists, you should be able to move around between the various Schemes and Racket reasonably easily. Of course, there's also CL and Clojure, but those are pretty different.
I didn't know that R had some Scheme ancestry. (For one client, I made an interface to call R from Racket, for a data science system.) I think one of the things Racket was heading towards, around the time of the math modules work, was for Racket to become a newer R. And perhaps have a `#lang r`, as another way of bringing in some of the wealth of R libraries and programmers (and also a similar situation with Fortran). I'm pretty sure we couldn't get Fortran performance with anything other than a native Fortran compiler, and I don't know the state of R performance, but Racket could've had closer to one of the main selling points of Python today (i.e., a wealth of data science libraries are available easily through it).
Re: Future of Racket
#35I feel like there's some paragraphs missing in this post between "I'm concerned the change won't help grow the community" and "I'll no longer learn or have fun in this community". He doesn't explicitly say how he expects his relationship with Racket to change, or why. He's implying , though not even outright stating, that he's distancing from Racket because of Matthew Flatt's proposal. That's begging for further expl…
He didn't rehash arguments that he had made on the Racket mailing list in his blog post. Here is one example: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/vN_1uUJZn...
Re: Future of Racket
#36The mailing list traffic on this topic took the wind out of my sails for wanting to spend my tinker time in Racket. On the one hand, it’s probably overreacting for me to throw in the towel on Racket at just the suggestion of this change. On the other hand, part of what makes me interested in writing Racket for projects where I have broad latitude is the sense that I’m both using an exciting technology, and a technolo…
Please don't be turned off by the recent commotion. (I'm sorry some of the commotion that might've discouraged you was by me.) Commotion happens because people care about Racket, and there are reasons they care. Racket actually has a couple-decade history of very good stability, other than a couple oopses that might've helped prompt the current attempt at greater community involvement in decisions. The history is too…
The legacy libraries and languages are maintained but not promoted. For example...
"Do not use #lang scheme to start new projects; #lang racket is the preferred language."
If #lang racket could go the way of #lang scheme, then it is harder for me to justify investing my time in #lang racket now.
Re: Future of Racket
#37I feel like there's some paragraphs missing in this post between "I'm concerned the change won't help grow the community" and "I'll no longer learn or have fun in this community". He doesn't explicitly say how he expects his relationship with Racket to change, or why. He's implying , though not even outright stating, that he's distancing from Racket because of Matthew Flatt's proposal. That's begging for further expl…
He didn't rehash arguments that he had made on the Racket mailing list in his blog post. Here is one example: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/vN_1uUJZn...
I'm not talking about his specific objections to the proposal. I'm talking about why those objections, which seem to be taking place in the context of a reasonable discussion where everyone's opinion is heard, have led him to the conclusion that he will no longer enjoy participating in the Racket community.
Re: Future of Racket
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't rehash arguments that he had made on the Racket mailing list in his blog post. Here is one example: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/vN_1uUJZn...
I'm not talking about his specific objections to the proposal. I'm talking about why those objections, which seem to be taking place in the context of a reasonable discussion where everyone's opinion is heard, have led him to the conclusion that he will no longer enjoy participating in the Racket community.
This is a key line from his post:
"Also to be fair, if you have some mileage on your odometer, your pattern-recognition machinery will quickly assign high probabilities to various outcomes."
His combination of personality and experience is leading him to draw conclusions about where Racket2 is headed that is causing him to press pause on using (and contributing to) Racket. I had a similar reaction (described in this post: https://www.travishinkelman.com/post/exploring-scheme-implem...).
It seems that you are not assigning as high of probability to the outcomes that Greg is concerned about. Or you are not as concerned about those outcomes.
Re: Future of Racket
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't be turned off by the recent commotion. (I'm sorry some of the commotion that might've discouraged you was by me.) Commotion happens because people care about Racket, and there are reasons they care. Racket actually has a couple-decade history of very good stability, other than a couple oopses that might've helped prompt the current attempt at greater community involvement in decisions. The history is too…
The legacy libraries and languages are maintained but not promoted. For example... "Do not use #lang scheme to start new projects; #lang racket is the preferred language." If #lang racket could go the way of #lang scheme, then it is harder for me to justify investing my time in #lang racket now.
I no longer think that `#lang racket` will be allowed to become a second-class citizen.
The reason is: I think it's become glaringly obvious, to everyone, that a large percentage of Racketeers (including some of the educators) have no interest in any non-sexp language. If it were forced, the community would fork, in some way.
Matthew Flatt, for example, is a really first-rate developer, and of goodwill, and has some understanding of this.
I speculate it could take a month before any new discussion. People on academic calendars might be getting in a little vacation after the summer conference schedule, and then ramping up the new school year in a few weeks.
Re: Future of Racket
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust is currently the most overhyped language because it promises a lot of things, but cannot hold the most important ones. It's a nice language, but don't believe any security guarantee. memory safety, type safety, concurrency safety massively overhyped. Still much better than C++ though.
> Still much better than C++ though. Well, no. There is zero reason to use Rust if you already know modern C++. Rust's only benefit is being newbie-friendly.
Rust
* is a lot simpler
* has a package manager
* has type classes (like interfaces with default implementations)
* doesn't have multiple inheritance or inheritance
* much nicer unified error/exception pattern
* amazing compiler error messages
* makes memory corruption and many forms of concurrency errors impossible(outside of ffi and unsafe)
* has tuples+sum types w/destructing