Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

Post by informatimago » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 4:37 PM UTC

j2438 wrote: post #37

innguest wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd encourage you to give it a longer try. When selecting a language, just pick R(5,6,7)RS and you're set. Liking syntax sugar is hardly a reason not to use the language with the most powerful macros around. You can write macros to provide nice literal syntax for whatever you want - this is part of the fun.

Have not yet learned to use or appreciate macros. The idea of everyone having to come up with their own syntax for such commonly-needed things as, say, hashes, seems counter-productive to me. That would lead to everyone's code looking like a different language.

    public class HelloWorld {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
            System.out.println("Hello, World");
        }
    }

    (main (print "Hello, World!"))

    http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZmcmdsoAXU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UOmItPa4iA
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlPavndhYxQ
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9xLi0iJg1g

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/gsQJOGKYUw4/oLLHW0f4Ce4J
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.programming/FiNIiSm5cJE/JkF5wa6Ke54J

Post by wtbob » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

mrottenkolber wrote: post #19

Chris911 wrote: post #14

What is a good resource to learn Lisp for an advanced (non Lisp) programmer? Most guides for most languages only cover declaration, simple functions and tiny applications. I want something that quickly goes through the basics and skips to advanced uses in bigger codebases.

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

informatimago wrote: post #62

j2438 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have not yet learned to use or appreciate macros. The idea of everyone having to come up with their own syntax for such commonly-needed things as, say, hashes, seems counter-productive to me. That would lead to everyone's code looking like a different language.

Tell me you wouldn't want to avoid this boilerplate: public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, World"); } } and instead write a nice little main macro, so you may just write: (main (print "Hello, World!")) Do that a few times in an application, and instead of 10 million LoC, you can write it in 100,000 LoC. This becomes much more maintainable! Also, see: Alan Kay "P…

Post by _djhrtmn » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

fa wrote: post #29

_djhrtmn wrote: post #22

Has anyone tried to use Butterick's Pollen and written about it? The idea of debugging your website with racket as you write markup and styles seemed really interesting alternative to what I do; write styles, refresh, and then refine the stylesheet by incrementally adding changes with the inspector and then copying them to my stylesheet.

I'm working through the admittedly beautiful and very thorough documentation [1]. It's a very simple idea, really: you write your document and sprinkle racket s-expressions wherever you want. You can put your definitions at the top of your document, or in another file. You describe your templates in Racket also, because like Butterick says in his RacketCon video [2], "S-expressions and XML are the same thing". You ca…

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69

Why hasn't XML been matched to Lisp very much? I think it's because Lisp programmers recoil in horror from XML. I mean, if you're already used to S expressions, XML looks disgusting. As verbose as Java, and less expressive. So I think most Lisp programmers look at XML and think "Ugh, don't get any of that on me..."