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Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

blog.racket-lang.org

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Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#31

Post by carterschonwald »

biscarch wrote: post #29
m0nastic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using different languages for different parts of the system. While I could probably do everything in one language, I'm not sold on the idea that that's actually a good idea (aside from developer convenience, which considering I'm the only developer I don't rate very highly). I also don't feel qualified enough as a language person to really hold defensible opinions about their relative strengths and weaknesses yet…

If you want to try out Haskell for web development again one day ping me (email in profile) and I'll send you a copy of Snap for Beginners[1]. I'm releasing it at the end of the week and it should make getting started in web dev with Haskell easier. [1] http://snapforbeginners.com/

Yeah. I'd recommend snap (or for really really simple stuff scotty)

Have you had the opportunity to try out the GHC 7.8 release candidate yet? For network io work loads the new io manager has some great scalability. I'm actually planning on writing some distributed systems tooling in Haskell once I get my first release of numerical Haskell out, which is soon!

Happy hacking and best of luck on the business side

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#33

Post by brudgers »

gexla wrote: post #24

Is Racket good for learning Lisp/Scheme or is it better to start with something else?

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students.

On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's not much benefit from using the Racket ecosystem for that. Likewise, if the goal is to work through On LISP then a common Lisp implementation makes sense.

Of course there's no reason not to have all those languages installed..or at least that's what I tell myself.

My last advice is that Racket is an ecosystem. It provides many languages including Algol and Datalog and Scribble and Typed Racket. This makes for a lot of documentation and it is uneven. The guide will be too shallow and the reference will be more boilerplate rather than providing deeper explanation and further examples.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#34

Post by m0nastic »

biscarch wrote: post #29
m0nastic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using different languages for different parts of the system. While I could probably do everything in one language, I'm not sold on the idea that that's actually a good idea (aside from developer convenience, which considering I'm the only developer I don't rate very highly). I also don't feel qualified enough as a language person to really hold defensible opinions about their relative strengths and weaknesses yet…

If you want to try out Haskell for web development again one day ping me (email in profile) and I'll send you a copy of Snap for Beginners[1]. I'm releasing it at the end of the week and it should make getting started in web dev with Haskell easier. [1] http://snapforbeginners.com/

Yeah, I pre-ordered your book, I look forward to reading it.

When I originally looked at using Yesod, it seemed fairly complicated for what I needed (which is basically just the crud-iest of crud apps). I'd only been using Haskell for a couple of months, and I'd never done any web programming; so I figured I should try to use something that wouldn't require quite so much "stuff".

I finally decided to try out Clojure because I'm planning on using Datomic for the main datastore (because it looks like I can have it backed by Cassandra, which lets me store all of our data in an HDFS cluster.) and the "Web Programming with Clojure" book just came out. I figured I could probably figure out a very basic database-driven view web app just by going through the book. That turned out to be true, actually, and it wasn't that hard to get my app up and running.

What dawned on me going through the book was that what seemed complicated to me really wasn't a function of the language, but the way almost all mvc web libraries seem to be laid out; and that actually once I understood how they worked, I could probably implement the same thing very similarly in almost any language that has a similar library.

So I might eventually look into making a REST api using Snap to handle the requests, and sort of encapsulating all input and output in the system with Haskell.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#35

Post by kenferry »

brudgers wrote: post #33
gexla wrote: post #24

Is Racket good for learning Lisp/Scheme or is it better to start with something else?

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students. On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's…

I've been working through SICP, and as far as I can tell Dr. Racket is actually the best way to do that. You just need to use Neil Van Dyke's SICP package for Racket. http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#36

Post by pavpanchekha »

I'm using Racket for a major project right now. It's been hit and miss. On the one hand, Racket is by far the best alternative/non-mainstream language—the docs are good, there are surprisingly broad libraries, and of course it's great to support the good people at Northeastern.

On the other hand, there is evidence here and there that this language isn't commonly used in production. For example, the pattern-matcher is very well-implemented and feature-full, but there's no way to use it programmatically nor is there a way to get the set of bindings. There is also the sad fact that Racket is a Scheme in the traditional Scheme fashion, and so is still trapped in an 80s design aesthetic. Generics are poor, ADTs aren't easily implemented, static types exist but are not so widely used and have strangenesses.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#37

Post by 616c »

brudgers wrote: post #33
gexla wrote: post #24

Is Racket good for learning Lisp/Scheme or is it better to start with something else?

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students. On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's…

FYI, brudgers makes good points, but the beauty of Racket is they have subsets and supersets of languages, from an Algol implementation to a specialized language built for studying SICP. Neil van Dyke and some other Racketeers built it. I think it might be in need of a maintainer, but here it is nonetheless.

http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/

Also keep in mind there is a different subset language designed by one of the developer/professors for his own book based upon his improvements to the SICP methodology, entitled How to Design Programs, as explained in his paper.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/fdpe2002-fffk.pdf

The second edition is available as HTML pages amongst the URLS below.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/teachpack/2htdpuniverse.html

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#38

Post by 616c »

kenferry wrote: post #35
brudgers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students. On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's…

I've been working through SICP, and as far as I can tell Dr. Racket is actually the best way to do that. You just need to use Neil Van Dyke's SICP package for Racket. http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/

Hats off to you, sir, you beat me to it.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#39

Post by laichzeit0 »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #30
derengel wrote: post #11

Just want to make note that DrRacket has the best integrated REPL of all the lisps around, its highly underestimated.

Have you tried SLIME? I'm wondering why you put DrRacket above SLIME.

Is SLIME any better than Geiser? I've been using it with Racket and it's pretty good.

http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#40

Post by bhrgunatha »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #39
bhrgunatha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried SLIME? I'm wondering why you put DrRacket above SLIME.

Is SLIME any better than Geiser? I've been using it with Racket and it's pretty good. http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/

As the linked doc says, geiser draws inspiration from Slime, but of course it's for Scheme rather than Lisp (or Common Lisp.)

From what I've read in the past I think most attempts to use Slime with Scheme haven't been wholly successful, hence geiser.

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