Racket v9.0

I used it to write a macro processor for C which allowed me to write some macros with s-expressions and have it expand to a lot of C code. That way I could actually write real macros for C.

I have also written GUI apps for various things. Kind of like what I did with TCL back in the day.

I wrote a little maths game for my son.

I also wrote a static site generator in it that allowed me to execute racket code at compile time (interpreting each markdown file as a source file).

I've often heard this, but I don't really know of many people in the PL dev community who build their language in Racket. Also, I've taught a PL course and I tried to use Racket as a component, but students mostly just struggled with the LISP-y ness of it all, as they were primarily used to Java and Python. In all, I'm not really sure who Racket is for.

Everyone gets to choose which language they use for their personal projects.

Where are all the Racket personal projects?

N.B. I say this as someone who personally contributed small fixes to Racket in the 90s (when it was called mzscheme) and 00s (when it was called PLT-Scheme).

I admit I'm one of those students who never used Racket in a non-academic setting (but mostly because I needed to contribute to already-existing projects written in different languages), and I was taught Racket from one of its main contributors, John Clements at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. However, learning Racket planted a seed in me that would later grow into a love of programming languages beyond industry-standard imperative ones.

I took a two-quarter series of classes from John Clements: the first was a course on programming language interpreters, and the second was a compilers course. The first course was taught entirely in Racket (then called DrScheme). As a guy who loved C and wanted to be the next Dennis Ritchie, I remember hating Racket at first, with all of its parentheses and feeling restricted by immutability and needing to express repetition using recursion. However, we gradually worked our way toward building a Scheme meta-circular evaluator. The second course was language-agnostic. Our first assignment was to write an interpreter for a subset of Scheme. We were allowed to use any language. I was tired of Racket and wanted to code in a much more familiar language: C++. Surely this was a sign of relief, right?

It turned out that C++ was a terrible choice for the job. I ended up writing a complex inheritance hierarchy of expression types, which could have easily been implemented using Racket's pattern matching capabilities. Additionally, C++ requires manual memory management, and this was before the C++11 standard with its introduction of smart pointers. Finally, I learned how functional programming paradigms make testing so much easier, compared to using object-oriented unit testing frameworks and dealing with mutable objects. I managed to get the project done and working in C++, but only after a grueling 40 hours.

I never complained about Racket after that.

In graduate school, I was taught Scala and Haskell from Cormac Flanagan, who also contributed to Racket. Sometime after graduate school, I got bit by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs hard....now I do a little bit of research on programming languages when I'm not busy teaching classes as a community college professor. I find Futamura projections quite fascinating.

I'm glad I was taught programming languages from John Clements and Cormac Flanagan. They planted seeds that later bloomed into a love for programming languages.