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Beautiful Racket v1.0

beautifulracket.com

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Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN

I get the same thing in Firefox

yep. ff/lnx here, all good.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#42

Has anyone used Racket for a long running application server? Last I remember it did not have native threads (ie, it could only use one core), and I don't know about it's reliability compared to something like the JVM.

It uses separate native threads with shared state for futures, though there are limitations on supported operations without defeating parallelism; it also offers message passing parrallelism with places, which I think are implemented as native processes.but may be threads (it's conceptually shared-nothing processes, but so are Erlang "processes" which are multiplexed onto native threads.)

But, in any case, Racket can use multiple cores, though the APIs for doing so are different than conventional threading APIs.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#43
post #33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, Butterick is averse to both making a PDF available and to responsive design. Perhaps — as a typographer and book designer — he prefers to control how the layout looks even if it means it looks bad on smaller screens. From the FAQ: * Will you ever release this book as a PDF or e-book? No. * Do you plan to opti­mize this book for mobile? No.

I could care less for a PDF - but epub is a pretty useful format for actually reading a book. And a Kindle book is also rather nice (mostly due to kindle syncing location in the books across devices etc - I would prefer to buy ebooks without the DRM, as there's the worry one will lose access for various technical or business reasons). And I'd like an offline copy - I do sometimes read in places without Internet acces…

Butterick cares deeply about typography and Amazon doesn't so I can see why he doesn't make a Kindle version. I too buy mostly Kindle books because it's easy to remove the DRM. It's been a while since I looked, but that was more difficult on Apple and Google ebooks.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#44
post #13

> I con­cede that the thump­ing noise is bet­ter for you with a paper­back. But oth­er­wise, the web-based book is bet­ter for every­one. The author's style seems to be very opinionated and blunt, and I appreciate that, but a web-based book is not better for me. The reasons listed are great examples of the benefits of web-based books, but I do not find web-based books readable. I read the FAQ, and I get it: he's not…

Have you considered an eReader such as the Amazon Paperwhite?

I don't think Butterick will release a Kindle version either.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#45
post #13

> I con­cede that the thump­ing noise is bet­ter for you with a paper­back. But oth­er­wise, the web-based book is bet­ter for every­one. The author's style seems to be very opinionated and blunt, and I appreciate that, but a web-based book is not better for me. The reasons listed are great examples of the benefits of web-based books, but I do not find web-based books readable. I read the FAQ, and I get it: he's not…

I am disappointed too. This looks like a very interesting book and there would be plenty of room on my bookshelf among the many Scheme, Common Lisp, and Clojure books that I have paid for and refer to frequently.

Good documentation is hard to find and having a physical copy means that I it will be available to me for decades. Almost 20 years ago I picked up a hardbound copy of "The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference" by Nicolai Josuttis and it is still something I love having within arms reach of my keyboard.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#47
post #24

Looks like an interesting book. And, on my surface pro, it's pretty. It's not very readable, as it is only dark-on-light, high contrast -- I prefer "night mode" for reading long-form. And it's unreadable on my Android device (both Firefox and Chrome), due not being a responsive design - the text is simply too small to read. For comparison I've read a handful of books on my Android - both epub and Kindle. A minimal te…

Maybe I have unnaturally good eyes, but I got through the first example on my dinky little Moto G2. Didn't seem too small to read for me.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#48
post #4

Cool. I'm always game for a good discussion of DSL's and Lisp (Racket). But what struck me immediately was the quality of the "Why Lisp Why Racket" essay. This is probably the most compelling that I've seen as it gets specific and cites near-term benefits – not just the elitist "it's good for you" or "it'll make you smarter" stuff. Nicely done.

Yes exactly. I already know Racket for academic reasons, but I've been interested in tinkering with DSLs (I've always longed for an embeddable functional programming language that I could have complete non-programmers use to provide simple formulas and conditional logic) so this is right up my alley.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#49

Question for someone experienced with Racket: does Racket offer immutable/persistent data structures?

Not sure on racket specifically if it does out of the box, but as a scheme(-like) language, this can be emulated via closures.

Perhaps relatedly, as a scheme(-like), it is tail recursive, implying infnite recursion and can be used in a near-purely-functional way if desired.

Re: Beautiful Racket v1.0

#50
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. It looks non-functional and ugly to me. https://i.imgur.com/DmPKqhM.png This is in contrast to something like nytimes.com which is really well designed.

Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN

It looks like the SVG's style block[0] applies a black background to the svg element:

    svg {background: rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)}
which fails to render in chrome due to the floats but renders fine in firefox. If set to white or removed entirely, it will display correctly in Firefox.

0: http://beautifulracket.com/img/polboxes16.svg

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