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Why Racket? Why Lisp?

practicaltypography.com

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Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#2

Post by aaronbrethorst »

From what I've seen out of the Clojure community over the past few years, it seems like they're far more likely (and able) to offer up concrete examples of how Clojure makes their businesses and products successful in a way that an imperative language could not. So, yay Clojure community, and boo on hand-wavy Lisp people.

e.g.:

http://www.kreuzwerker.de/en/blog/posts/why-clojure-rocks-2/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5113060

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#3

Post by cturner »

The top reason here could been written - lisp is more expressive. You can find ways to express an idea that make sense now, and which are readable. Macros is a different part of the same idea.

--

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but a problem I've had with racket is as you begin to build larger projects, when something breaks it can be quite difficult to find out exactly where the break happened. When you compile Java or run Python, it's almost always immediately obvious what broke.

The way I got around this was to use a methodical TDD approach. Would be a shame if that turns out to be as good as it gets for lisp.

Something I haven't done yet but am interested to get to is attaching a repl console to a running process.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#6

Post by _ofdw »

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers.

As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression-is-a-list feature prevented me from doing what I wanted to do.

So I just don't really feel the need to get repetitive strain injuries in my pinky from reaching for the parentheses all the time.

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#9

Post by cespare »

_ofdw wrote: post #6

I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers. As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression…

As someone who writes Lisp (well, Clojure) every day and does not particularly enjoy it, I find the common complaint about parentheses to be a non-issue.

In fact, I'm not sure I've heard of anyone who wrote any significant amount of lisp code and came away talking about parentheses. This seems to be mostly a reaction from people who've read a bit of Lisp without using it.

Then again, I just noticed that I type ( and ) with my third and fourth fingers, so maybe it would be worse if I typed properly :)

Re: Why Racket? Why Lisp?

#10

Post by fake-name »

arm wrote: post #7
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #4

That's some pretty ugly text for a site called 'practical typography'.

Oh? What makes you say that? On my OS X computer at least, it honestly looks gorgeous: http://f.cl.ly/items/3o2r3E2T2y3v3M3T291i/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Yeah, except the obnoxious diamond symbols used to denote each link, rather then underlining them, like has been standard for 20 years now.
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