Racket 5.2 Released • Hacker News Board

Re: Racket 5.2 Released

#11

Post by noahl » Thu, Nov 10, 2011, 1:03 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #9

Would How to Design Programs ( http://www.htdp.org/ ) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book. And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things tha…

I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea of what is important to teach first. SICP deals with more fundamental issues, and is much more worth your time. Although I should point out that I have only read a bit of HTDP, and looked at the table of contents.

Re: Racket 5.2 Released

#12

Post by oddthink » Thu, Nov 10, 2011, 1:17 PM UTC

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #2

Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use. That list of features is awesome. This, just a few months since they redid all of Racket's graphics library. Well done!

Does anyone know of a few good examples of using Racket's GUI and drawing/canvas library? I took a look at it a few weeks ago, in the hopes of coming up with a portable way to do simple graphics examples, such as turtles and life and drawing character, but it felt like it would take a lot of study to get anything working. (I've done more curses than Tk, and more Tk than Swing, and not much else.)

Re: Racket 5.2 Released

#13

Post by jeffcoat » Thu, Nov 10, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #9

Would How to Design Programs ( http://www.htdp.org/ ) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book. And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things tha…

It's a fine combination; as the settings hint, they were designed to be used together.

Re: Racket 5.2 Released

#14

Post by lambdapilgrim » Thu, Nov 10, 2011, 6:02 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #9

Would How to Design Programs ( http://www.htdp.org/ ) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book. And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things tha…

I would like to give my enthusiastic vote to Racket as I am working through SICP exercises in Dr Racket. I find it very simple to use IDE. It just gets out of your way to perform simple REPL, has separate definitions and console panels. Its debugging feature is fairly intuitive. It also has more advanced features when one is ready for it.

Re: Racket 5.2 Released

#15

Post by exDM69 » Fri, Nov 11, 2011, 1:02 PM UTC

noahl wrote: post #11

exDM69 wrote: post #9

Would How to Design Programs ( http://www.htdp.org/ ) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book. And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things tha…

I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html ). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea of what is important to teach first. SICP deals with more fundamental issues, and is much more worth your time. Although I should point out that I have only read a bit of HTDP, and looked…

SICP is excellent but I'm not sure if it should be the first touch you have to programming. HTDP might be a little more practical and easy to approach. Maybe for a computer scientist, SICP would be fine but for someone who wants to learn a little bit of coding, SICP is overkill.

Also, SICP's examples are intended for people with strong background in maths, etc (what you can expect from a CS student), like the examples on finding square roots or doing symbolic differentiation. Don't get me wrong, though. I personally like these examples a lot but I'm a pretty hard core CS geek.