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Racket v5.3.2

blog.racket-lang.org

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Re: Racket v5.3.2

#31

Post by soegaard »

tikhonj wrote: post #4
DASD wrote: post #2

Am I the only one who forgets Racket? Everytime I visit the site and browse through the documentation, I find myself wondering why I'm not using the language. Years ago I used Chicken Scheme but this seems more robust and the standard library is adequate. Who's using this in production? What's your experience?

Well, I haven't used it in production , but I used it for a research project last semester. It was actually pretty good, and there are definitely some very nice features. The standard library was pretty good except it missed some functional features I wanted like immutable vectors (or even just functional operations on mutable vectors). The language is extremely flexible, and you can take advantage of this to write s…

You will be pleased to know, that functional vectors are included in the latest release. Look for "array" in the v5.3.2 documentation.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#32

Post by pekk »

dingfeng_quek wrote: post #21
DASD wrote: post #2

Am I the only one who forgets Racket? Everytime I visit the site and browse through the documentation, I find myself wondering why I'm not using the language. Years ago I used Chicken Scheme but this seems more robust and the standard library is adequate. Who's using this in production? What's your experience?

I used to use Racket in production and prototyping (few years ago), as a "glue language" and "business-logic" for a web-app, for the parts that are not IO, memory, compute intensive, etc. My metrics for language choice are: 1. Simple to learn and remember (they tend to correspond) 2. Module System; Support for modularization of complexity 3. Simplicity of coding and maintaining simple modules 4. Simplicity of coding…

I haven't used Racket, though it looks cool. Since you are conversant in a few languages, I'd like to pick your brain if I can:

What do you think Racket could do to improve (particularly 5)?

And what could other languages learn from Racket's module system?

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#33

Post by outworlder »

DASD wrote: post #2

Am I the only one who forgets Racket? Everytime I visit the site and browse through the documentation, I find myself wondering why I'm not using the language. Years ago I used Chicken Scheme but this seems more robust and the standard library is adequate. Who's using this in production? What's your experience?

Well, 'years ago' is a long time. You'll probably find out that Chicken has evolved a lot since then. As has the list of available eggs.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#34

Post by graue »

pjmlp wrote: post #15
tikhonj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm a little biased, but I would learn Haskell. It's the one I learned first--in fact, I learned it during my very first college CS course. (The course, coincidentally, was in Scheme.) If I managed it as a freshman, it can't be all that difficult :P. Haskell has a couple of very good freely available books: Learn You a Haskell [1] and Real World Haskell [2]. I also found Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours [3]…

For Windows developers I would advice to use F# instead. Being a Microsoft language helps smuggle it into the work environment of the enterprise. It has become my scripting language for Windows tasks.

OK, I'm curious now. Wikipedia says[1] the reference implementation is open-source and cross-platform, which is great, but I never hear of anyone talking about F# outside the Microsoft world.

The compiler has to be compiled from source[2] on Ubuntu, which seems to suggest hardly anyone is using it.

Would there be any compelling reason to use F# if you're not working in a primarily Microsoft environment? What does the language itself offer over Ocaml or Haskell?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_%28programming_languag...

[2]: https://fsxplat.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=FSharpLinux

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#35

Post by stonemetal »

graue wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Windows developers I would advice to use F# instead. Being a Microsoft language helps smuggle it into the work environment of the enterprise. It has become my scripting language for Windows tasks.

OK, I'm curious now. Wikipedia says[1] the reference implementation is open-source and cross-platform, which is great, but I never hear of anyone talking about F# outside the Microsoft world. The compiler has to be compiled from source[2] on Ubuntu, which seems to suggest hardly anyone is using it. Would there be any compelling reason to use F# if you're not working in a primarily Microsoft environment? What does the…

From what I understand F# works on mono and the F# MS team actually puts in effort to make sure it does. Though for whatever reason mono just isn't that good at running F# code. Maybe it is a weak GC or lack of ability to optimize the code patterns F# produces, I don't know. It is slower than F# on CLR.

Given that, library access and ability to thread are the two big things it is going to have over Ocaml. Cleaner syntax when compared to Ocaml too. Haskell, not much.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#36

Post by JadeNB »

chimeracoder wrote: post #27
tikhonj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I haven't used it in production , but I used it for a research project last semester. It was actually pretty good, and there are definitely some very nice features. The standard library was pretty good except it missed some functional features I wanted like immutable vectors (or even just functional operations on mutable vectors). The language is extremely flexible, and you can take advantage of this to write s…

> Also, for a dynamically typed language, I thought it had too many different types. It was too easy to get mixed up between bytestrings and strings, for example. It was also not obvious when you should use or expect nil vs #f. That said, the features for creating your own types (mostly structs) were very good--I found they were very lightweight but still flexible enough to be useful. You can also used a typed dialec…

> > Also, for a dynamically typed language, I thought it had too many different types.

> You can also used a typed dialect of Racket if that's easier

I'm not sure that proposing a move to a typed dialect will solve a problem with too many different types. :-)

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#37

Post by tikhonj »

JadeNB wrote: post #36
chimeracoder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, for a dynamically typed language, I thought it had too many different types. It was too easy to get mixed up between bytestrings and strings, for example. It was also not obvious when you should use or expect nil vs #f. That said, the features for creating your own types (mostly structs) were very good--I found they were very lightweight but still flexible enough to be useful. You can also used a typed dialec…

> > Also, for a dynamically typed language, I thought it had too many different types. > You can also used a typed dialect of Racket if that's easier I'm not sure that proposing a move to a typed dialect will solve a problem with too many different types. :-)

Actually, I think it would. The problem is not too many types per se, but too many types without a good way of managing them. All a static type system is is a good way to manage types!

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#38

Post by mlinksva »

https://class.coursera.org/proglang-2012-001/wiki/view?page=... is going to cover Racket (the first part, now in progress, uses ML).

Never having done anything non-trivial in a Lisp or Scheme, I'm looking forward to filling in a tiny bit of this huge gap in my knowledge. But like some other posters, I'll be surprised if I end up liking it better than Haskell.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#39

Post by S4M »

I am curious, is there someone with experience with Racket and Clojure? What are the advantages of Racket over Clojure?

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#40

Post by pjmlp »

graue wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Windows developers I would advice to use F# instead. Being a Microsoft language helps smuggle it into the work environment of the enterprise. It has become my scripting language for Windows tasks.

OK, I'm curious now. Wikipedia says[1] the reference implementation is open-source and cross-platform, which is great, but I never hear of anyone talking about F# outside the Microsoft world. The compiler has to be compiled from source[2] on Ubuntu, which seems to suggest hardly anyone is using it. Would there be any compelling reason to use F# if you're not working in a primarily Microsoft environment? What does the…

If you're not on a Microsoft shop, then I think OCaml or Haskell might be a better option.

Queries and type providers are nice features of F# 3.0, but not sure how much it would matter as feature.

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