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Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

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Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#91

Post by Dewie »

markc wrote: post #82
codeshaman wrote: post #36

It's about a month since I've started seriously diving into lisp. The last couple of weeks I've spent my days reading 'The joy of Clojure', Structure and Interpretation of Computer programs, lots of tutorials and documentation, playing around in the repl + experimenting with all kinds of frameworks and libs in clojure (eg. Om). I've spent today implementing the brainfuck interpreter in Racket. I can't explain it, it'…

>But never have I experienced this kind of mental strain/obsession as I do now with lisp. That's why it's so valuable as a right of passage. If you've spent your career writing simple iterative imperative loops, suddenly you're a newb again with map/filter/reduce this, partial that, and recursion and lambdas and closures and finally after your 20th time staring, dazed at 3 measly lines of nested composed recursion -…

* rite of passage

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#92

Post by codeshaman »

wz1000 wrote: post #84
codeshaman wrote: post #36

It's about a month since I've started seriously diving into lisp. The last couple of weeks I've spent my days reading 'The joy of Clojure', Structure and Interpretation of Computer programs, lots of tutorials and documentation, playing around in the repl + experimenting with all kinds of frameworks and libs in clojure (eg. Om). I've spent today implementing the brainfuck interpreter in Racket. I can't explain it, it'…

I went through a Lisp phase exactly like that. Currently I'm going through an extremely similar Haskell phase. I've learnt half a dozen languages before these two, but I've never experienced the satisfaction and obsession I've experienced with these two. My Lisp phase went on for the better part of a year, and I've been learning all the Haskell I can for 11 months now, but my obsession is still in full force. Haskell…

Yeah, I feel that Haskell might also have this ability to energise a bored mind. The purity, the cleanliness, the power. Definitely on my list. This year, though, I feel will be the year of the 'great lisp project' for me.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#93

Post by chipotle_coyote »

_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 on converting a fiction ebook to web-based with Pollen and may later launch a fiction magazine using it, although I'm undecided about that technology choice.

I think Pollen's biggest strength is that you can reprogram its markup -- as its documentation puts it, you can attach behavior to tags. I haven't taken much advantage of that yet, but you can do things like create a "TOC" tag that builds a table of contents by inspecting child documents and looking for h1 tags (or looking for, say, "chapter" tags, which you've defined to expand to ""), or inspect the contents of paragraphs and subtly shift the first line margin to the left if the first character is a quote mark (which Butterick's Practical Typography does). You could replicate some of that with a template language that allows user-definable tags, but I don't think you could do all of it.

Its biggest weakness, at least for me, has been finding a pleasant workflow. Despite having a built-in web server it feels kind of clunky compared to other static site generators. You're largely on your own for writing a deployment script ("raco pollen clone" is not a valid substitute). The DrRacket IDE is virtually a requirement for Racket programming, but it sucks teabags for editing long prose documents; you'll likely find yourself working in one editor for Racket language files and another for Pollen source. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but it's at the least annoying.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#94

Post by wedesoft »

s_kilk wrote: post #4
adregan wrote: post #2

Previous discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8206038 Have noticed quite a bit more buzz about Racket and Lisp very recently around here. It's always been something I mean to explore.

We seem to be on a Racket buzz lately, and I like it. I feel more inspired to dig further into Racket. I'm already pretty good with Clojure, so can anyone who knows both languages well comment on the ups and downs of learning Racket after learning Clojure?

Here is a talk by David Nolen comparing Scheme and Clojure (and my summary of it):

http://www.wedesoft.de/clojure-for-schemers.html

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#95

Post by sea6ear »

j2438 wrote: post #18

I have so far stuck with Clojure instead of a Scheme primarily because of the nice literal syntax for maps, sets, vectors, and regexes that Clojure supports. I don't want to give that up and just use cons/car/cdr. And also, last time I looked at Racket, it seemed very focused on academics. I just wanted to write some simple Scheme in a .scm file and try it out (a script), but I think I had to choose a language first…

I believe Rackjure [0] gives some of the particular conveniences of Clojure back to Racket.

[0] http://www.greghendershott.com/rackjure/

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#96

Post by innguest »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #66
informatimago wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. And then imagine that you have to take over someone else's 100,000 LoC written with their own, unique, macros, some of which may invoke other macros, and interact with them in surprising ways, depending on what's passed into them. Now you have to be able to keep in your head what all those macros do (including to each other) while you're trying to read those 100,000 LoC. At that point, you may not find the macr…

Imagine you have to take over someone else's 1,000,000 LoC written with their own, unique, classes and methods, some of which may invoke other methods, and interact with instance variables in surprising ways, depending on which method gets called first. Now you have to be able to keep in your head the flow of data (because the methods need not explicitly pass instance variables around) while you're trying to read those 1,000,000 verbose LoC.

At that point, you may not find Objects (aka copyable global scopes where instance variables are globally available to all instance methods of a class) to be so much of an improvement over symbolic computation.

Honestly, what you said never happens in practice (no one is abusing macros like that) but what I said is literally taught by Sandi Metz in her book Practical OOP in Ruby.

Your (common) reaction is just your everyday fear of the unknown. Try it.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#97

Post by muraiki »

fnordsensei wrote: post #25
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.

Also, recently published, Clojure for the Brave and True: http://www.nostarch.com/clojure or http://www.braveclojure.com/

I also recommend this book/website. The pacing is good and it gets into some of the really nice parts of Clojure, such as handling concurrency, with clear explanations. Heck, it even has a small intro to Java so you can interact with the enemy to some degree. ;)

A more interesting and unusual section of the book is the intro to using Emacs with Clojure -- it's not necessary to use Emacs, but you will learn how to edit all those parentheses without worrying about editing parentheses. Even if you don't use Emacs, this feature (paredit) is available for many editors and IDEs, so it's worth checking out.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#99

Post by thro1237 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #66
informatimago wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. And then imagine that you have to take over someone else's 100,000 LoC written with their own, unique, macros, some of which may invoke other macros, and interact with them in surprising ways, depending on what's passed into them. Now you have to be able to keep in your head what all those macros do (including to each other) while you're trying to read those 100,000 LoC. At that point, you may not find the macr…

This. I used to do all my programming in clojure. Now I am going back to python -- because I am not able to figure out a month after writing some code, what these deep recursive, reduce, apply things do.. But it is a good exercise writing it.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

#100

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #48

"Paul Graham’s programming language Arc, a dialect of Lisp, was built on top of Racket." Since that statement occurs in a section about Racket languages, I should probably clarify. Arc isn't technically a Racket language—that is, it doesn't use any of Racket's facilities for defining new languages. It compiles to Racket (and so you're all using it right now), but has its own distinct implementation. Historically, Arc…

[deleted]
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