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Racket News – Issue 31

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Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#12

Post by mark_l_watson »

I would like to see wider adoption of Racket. I spent six weeks earlier this year evaluating and comparing Racket, LispWorks Common Lisp, and Swift for an application [1] I am working on. I ended up not choosing Racket, but it was a very close decision.

As a modern Lisp, Racket really has it all: vibrant user and dev community, portable GUI support, easy to make standalone applications, and great libraries.

[1] http://knowledgegraphnavigator.com/

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#13

Post by spdegabrielle »

pontusrehula wrote: post #3

A lot of new MIDI packages :p rs(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. fuzzy-search(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. planning(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.

Funny! That’s been fixed now.

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#14

Post by klibertp »

iddiid wrote: post #10
klibertp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what is it that you don't like about Racket macros? The quote doesn't explain it. Is it the fact that there are some concepts to learn before you can use them effectively? > that precludes hygienic macros. The fact that you are so fixated on hygiene as problematic, but can't really explain why you think it's like this, is a huge red herring.

This is from you (1), it shows that you don't have any problem in managing your precious time: (1) To be honest, the whole thing took me nearly a year to finish (including writing this post). I could work on it only once in a while, and I hit a few roadblocks which took many sessions to work around. I mentioned it briefly before, but getting Io code to compile was one such roadblock

...wait, what? That post is about Io, not Racket. I honestly don't understand what is it you're trying to say?

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#16

Post by baldfat »

pontusrehula wrote: post #3

A lot of new MIDI packages :p rs(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. fuzzy-search(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. planning(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.

I started using Racket for some MIDI a few months ago. Racket is a great little music play ground.

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#17

Post by baldfat »

iddiid wrote: post #2

Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is th…

Quote: the language is more oriented to researcher than to get things done.

I can't disagree with that more. The whole reason why I switched to Racket is how quickly I can do things. I actually feel like it is much faster to go from idea to a running program in Racket then in Python. If I want to write a MIDI program o do sequences it takes me seconds to get something working making some noise.

EXAMPLE: Racket makes executables super easy and fast. Python doesn't still have a way to go from my program on my computer to others easily.

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#19

Post by baldfat »

iddiid wrote: post #6
jdormit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What don't you like about Racket macros? AFAIK Racket has the most advanced macro hygiene system out of any of the other languages you mentioned - it guarantees that all macros are hygienic by default, as opposed to other Lisps which require you to manually call (gensym) or use special syntax in your macro to guarantee that macro symbols don't shadow existing bindings.

From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion) But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah. (1) https…

This is FAR from a research language. What multi-purpose language is a research first language? Racket is no Haskell.

Re: Racket News – Issue 31

#20

Post by tjr »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #12

I would like to see wider adoption of Racket. I spent six weeks earlier this year evaluating and comparing Racket, LispWorks Common Lisp, and Swift for an application [1] I am working on. I ended up not choosing Racket, but it was a very close decision. As a modern Lisp, Racket really has it all: vibrant user and dev community, portable GUI support, easy to make standalone applications, and great libraries. [1] http:…

Can you share, what was the deciding factor against Racket?
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