Systems Programming with Racket

Post by cpach » Mon, May 02, 2011, 6:51 PM UTC

vegashacker wrote: post #11

mquander wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Great non-emacs Lisp IDE, powerful, cross-platform, and easy for newbies (but emacs works fine too) * Tons of interesting language extensions -- any Scheme you have ever thought of -- implementations of laziness, static typing, logic programming, FRP * Very good online documentation * Great libraries for lots of things, combined with really easy online package management @ http://planet.racket-lang.org/ * Go look a…

Also, folks are super responsive on the mailing list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/listinfo

Post by alexk7 » Mon, May 02, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

joshhart wrote: post #4

icey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call "Systems Programming"? (I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you haven't provided a definition of what you consider systems programming.)

I'm not the parent, but I usually consider anything requiring fairly intimate knowledge of the hardware and operating system "systems programming", such as writing a database. Others seem to refer to it as anything that could be considered part of the OS, like writing drivers.

Post by xiaomai » Mon, May 02, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

rwl wrote: post #9

xiaomai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love racket. It's basically scheme with a bunch of extra goodness (libraries, language features) added on top. You may have heard of it before it was renamed (it used to be known as PLT Scheme). I've just started working through Land of Lisp as well. I find myself wishing I were writing Racket instead of Common Lisp, but it's entirely possible that's just because I'm more familiar with Racket/scheme.

I am also more familiar with Racket and Scheme, but was considering working through Land of Lisp. Do the code and problems in the book lend themselves to translation into other languages? That is, do you think one could learn both CL and Racket fairly well by working through the book first in CL, then translating to Racket?

Post by mark_l_watson » Tue, May 03, 2011, 12:00 AM UTC

swannodette wrote: post #13

rauljara wrote: post #5

Slightly off-topic: ever since I started working my way through Land of Lisp a while ago, I decided I would spend some time trying to seriously learn a lisp dialect. I was thinking that dialect would be Clojure because of its compatibility with Java and its community. But can anyone speak for Racket? I couldn't find a "why racket?" section on their homepage.

Racket is simply fantastic. I use both Clojure and Racket and I have few complaints about either. Clojure's main advantages are the performance of the JVM, larger library ecosystem, and a larger community. Racket has plenty of things to be jealous of though, the efficient pattern matcher, the typed variant and the contract system are particularly cool.

Post by singular » Tue, May 03, 2011, 12:42 AM UTC

MaysonL wrote: post #29

singular wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rant warning... I tried racket but just could not get namespaces to work, and the tool I was using, ometa for scheme[1] did not want to work properly without them. I spent hours, asked on the chat, read the documentation, etc. but just could not get it working. It felt like a bad omen, and ever since I've unfortunately been put off the language. The whole response I got/the documentation treated the whole thing as 'w…

Interestingly enough, the latest update [4 months ago] to ometa for scheme has the following description: Update mzscheme namespace usage for eval to use namespace anchors