51–60 of 154 posts
Well, I'm pretty sure this is going to go badly for me in the end, but I might as well leave this here: https://ihateracket.com
Who are the current major users of Racket? Are there any large commercial codebases written in it?
Carmack is a huge fan of Racket. He was going to use it as the scripting language for VR until the Oculus execs made him use JavaScript instead (boooooo) https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/807797812700348416
Last week I tried writing a new Love2d mode for Emacs in Emacs Lisp, but it was on Windows so my muscle memory for Paredit wasn't helpful. Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. Last night I wrote the same plugin for VS Code which used JavaScript, and naturally it was effortless. It got me thinking about how s-expressions are inherently hostile to non-customized setups, whereas Java…
Then, one day, I turned it off. I'm not sure why.
I think it's because I didn't want to get too attached to it. I reasoned that Paredit wouldn't always be in the places I was working with Lisp, so I had better remain flexible enough to not need it. And between the editor's paren matching and the way I format my Lisp code, I can be pretty productive in Lisp without Paredit or a similar structural editing tool.
Also, AFAIK Paredit is pure Elisp, so should work just fine in Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. I used to write C and C++ code in (non-vim) vi, with only autoindent, and it was fine. I could also type the spaces, if I had to. For s-expressions, like in a Lisp, you want autoindent a bit more, and some kind of of paren-matching/highlighting is also important. Fortunately, editors have been doing autoindent and paren-matching for decades.…
I agree that a good IDE experience is a core part of the language nowadays. And in my experience, VS Code + TypeScript is by far the best IDE experience, far better than Clojure + Emacs ever was. A significant amount of productivity that I thought that combination was giving me turned out to just be a feeling of productivity because of how ninja the stuff I was doing was. Similar to how I'm faster in Emacs than I was…
Who are the current major users of Racket? Are there any large commercial codebases written in it?
Who are the current major users of Racket? Are there any large commercial codebases written in it?
Well, I'm pretty sure this is going to go badly for me in the end, but I might as well leave this here: https://ihateracket.com
I recommend HtDP and Racket semi-regularly because 1) the incidental complexity of getting started with DrRacket is so low and 2) I don't have a better recommendation for a book that covers the same fundamentals.
Do you have suggestions to recommend instead?
Well, I'm pretty sure this is going to go badly for me in the end, but I might as well leave this here: https://ihateracket.com
And before any says it, yes, I do love the idea of students EVENTUALLY learning a Lisp/Racket kind of language before they graduate. I would even be happy with an entire course dedicated to it. But I don't want that to be the CS1. I've just seen it go so wrong for so long now.
Most of the points in the article are valid, and I especially agree that Racket or another Scheme should be taught at some point later on. Maybe even implementing a Scheme as a final course project or something like that (although that might not make sense outside a compilers class...)
Does Racket support "real" multithreading yet? I remember looking at their documentation a few years ago and it only had support for a green-threading thing, which (along with the first-class hashmaps) steered me towards Clojure.
You can use futures, which have access to underlying OS threads. They don’t share a memory space though. There’s also an Actor library called Goblins which is nice, but I’m not sure if can use multiple cores.
It's more easy to use places, you can run whatever you want in places, but the communication between places is restricted and they have a big startup time (something like a quarter of a second) so if you create one, ensure that you are going to use it for a long time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Editing s-expressions is a nightmare without some kind of automatic help. I used to write C and C++ code in (non-vim) vi, with only autoindent, and it was fine. I could also type the spaces, if I had to. For s-expressions, like in a Lisp, you want autoindent a bit more, and some kind of of paren-matching/highlighting is also important. Fortunately, editors have been doing autoindent and paren-matching for decades.…
I agree that a good IDE experience is a core part of the language nowadays. And in my experience, VS Code + TypeScript is by far the best IDE experience, far better than Clojure + Emacs ever was. A significant amount of productivity that I thought that combination was giving me turned out to just be a feeling of productivity because of how ninja the stuff I was doing was. Similar to how I'm faster in Emacs than I was…
I concede that I do not do any web or graphics development at the moment, this might help. But it's deeply satisfying to be able to discover new helpful functionality in the tools that are there for decades. And it's good to be able to use them almost everywhere, be it on a server over ssh or on a windows box with cygwin.