Racket v5.3.2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#41

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Feb 01, 2013, 11:34 PM UTC

miloshadzic wrote: post #28

tikhonj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm a little biased, but I would learn Haskell. It's the one I learned first--in fact, I learned it during my very first college CS course. (The course, coincidentally, was in Scheme.) If I managed it as a freshman, it can't be all that difficult :P. Haskell has a couple of very good freely available books: Learn You a Haskell [1] and Real World Haskell [2]. I also found Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours [3]…

For what it's worth, OCaml will somewhat soon have a "Real World" book by the guys who've been using it for very real world work for quite some time. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024743.do

Looking forward to it.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#42

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Feb 01, 2013, 11:36 PM UTC

stonemetal wrote: post #35

graue wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'm curious now. Wikipedia says[1] the reference implementation is open-source and cross-platform, which is great, but I never hear of anyone talking about F# outside the Microsoft world. The compiler has to be compiled from source[2] on Ubuntu, which seems to suggest hardly anyone is using it. Would there be any compelling reason to use F# if you're not working in a primarily Microsoft environment? What does the…

From what I understand F# works on mono and the F# MS team actually puts in effort to make sure it does. Though for whatever reason mono just isn't that good at running F# code. Maybe it is a weak GC or lack of ability to optimize the code patterns F# produces, I don't know. It is slower than F# on CLR. Given that, library access and ability to thread are the two big things it is going to have over Ocaml. Cleaner syn…

The GC was not that great, but the new S-Gen is quite comparable to the CLR one.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#43

Post by greyfade » Sat, Feb 02, 2013, 7:09 AM UTC

DASD wrote: post #2

Am I the only one who forgets Racket? Everytime I visit the site and browse through the documentation, I find myself wondering why I'm not using the language. Years ago I used Chicken Scheme but this seems more robust and the standard library is adequate. Who's using this in production? What's your experience?

I'm not affiliated with them, but I know Naughty Dog, the developers behind the Uncharted series, Jak and Daxter, Crash Bandicoot, and the upcoming The Last of Us, have long used Lisp dialects in all their games. The game engine driving Uncharted uses a port of MzScheme for the majority of their development pipeline and game logic.

They've talked about how it improves their workflow for years. You can find some of their articles and presentations if you look for references to GOAL (game-oriented assembly language) and GOOL (game-oriented object language), their in-house Lisp dialects.

Re: Racket v5.3.2

#44

Post by elibarzilay » Sat, Feb 02, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

_sh wrote: post #9

tikhonj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I haven't used it in production , but I used it for a research project last semester. It was actually pretty good, and there are definitely some very nice features. The standard library was pretty good except it missed some functional features I wanted like immutable vectors (or even just functional operations on mutable vectors). The language is extremely flexible, and you can take advantage of this to write s…

Racket now has all manner of purely functional data structures (Okasaki and Bagwell) available as a library on Planet: http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package-source/krhari/pfds.plt/...

Not just now -- this library has been up for a number of years.