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Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

blog.racket-lang.org

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Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#51

Post by noelwelsh »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #36

I'm using Racket for a major project right now. It's been hit and miss. On the one hand, Racket is by far the best alternative/non-mainstream language—the docs are good, there are surprisingly broad libraries, and of course it's great to support the good people at Northeastern. On the other hand, there is evidence here and there that this language isn't commonly used in production. For example, the pattern-matcher is…

"no way to use it programmatically nor is there a way to get the set of bindings"

These don't really make sense in the context of Racket. Pattern matching is a macro and thus doesn't exist at run time, though of course with eval the distinction between run time and expansion time is not so well defined. Accessing the lexical environment is not something you do in Racket -- it breaks optimisations and is generally considered a bad idea.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#52

Post by userbinator »

makmanalp wrote: post #47

I like that the docs look less like they jumped out of the geocities era. Still could go a long way though. Signalling is important, and if you signal "old and unupdated" to your users, that's not a great start. (e.g.: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pkg/Package_Concepts.html ) "prev", "next" (when the table of content is right there next to it) and "top" (usually the header / logo link these days) and collapsible TOC tr…

> http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc/ (ughhhh)

Despite me not really liking Java all that much, the javadocs can be very useful; although in that example they chose a bad non-default colour - black on (dark) green is difficult to read.

Here's a better example, they normally look more like this: http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#53

Post by codygman »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #9
samth wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used in production in a variety of places: Naughty Dog studios, NBCUniversal, Air Force research labs, defense contractors, web developers.

Here's a talk on Racket in Naughty Dog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

Thanks, that was a nice video. Cool to see that Racket is getting used since a lot of work was put into it by very smart people.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#56

Post by SixSigma »

m0nastic wrote: post #17
oskarth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come you are using all three of those languages in production rather than just one of them?

I'm using different languages for different parts of the system. While I could probably do everything in one language, I'm not sold on the idea that that's actually a good idea (aside from developer convenience, which considering I'm the only developer I don't rate very highly). I also don't feel qualified enough as a language person to really hold defensible opinions about their relative strengths and weaknesses yet…

> a network service

sigh solving the same problems over and over and over

inetd, xinetd, djb's tcpserver, probably others and heck, even systemd have all offered well tested and hardened solutions this this problem.

Every generation rewrites Unix badly

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#57

Post by brudgers »

Crito wrote: post #44
brudgers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students. On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's…

It has admittedly been several years, but I distinctly remember MIT Scheme being an utter pain in the ass to get built. I'd recommend Racket for people just getting off the ground for that reason alone.

Last month I built MIT Scheme on my 13 year old Toshiba Satellite (and it was the cheap one in 2001) under Wary Puppy 5.5. No problems. Because of its richer feature set, Guile was another matter and I gave up.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#58

Post by brudgers »

616c wrote: post #37
brudgers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in learning a LISP, then Racket makes a lot of sense. It is actively being developed and extended and because of its roots in academia extensions tend to be address interesting problems- many arise out of computer science research by professors and grad students. On the other hand, if you want to learn Scheme by working through SICP, then I would recommend MIT Scheme to avoid impedance. There's…

FYI, brudgers makes good points, but the beauty of Racket is they have subsets and supersets of languages, from an Algol implementation to a specialized language built for studying SICP. Neil van Dyke and some other Racketeers built it. I think it might be in need of a maintainer, but here it is nonetheless. http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/ Also keep in mind there is a different subset language designed by one…

Felleisen's How to Design Programs has an entirety different set of goals than SICP. HtDP teaches programming practices. SICP teaches 'computer science.'

HtDP is a great book, but no substitute for SICP in terms of content.

Re: Racket 6.0: New package system, new doc CSS, JIT support for ARM

#60

Post by douglasisshiny »

brudgers wrote: post #58
616c wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, brudgers makes good points, but the beauty of Racket is they have subsets and supersets of languages, from an Algol implementation to a specialized language built for studying SICP. Neil van Dyke and some other Racketeers built it. I think it might be in need of a maintainer, but here it is nonetheless. http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/ Also keep in mind there is a different subset language designed by one…

Felleisen's How to Design Programs has an entirety different set of goals than SICP. HtDP teaches programming practices. SICP teaches 'computer science.' HtDP is a great book, but no substitute for SICP in terms of content.

While I haven't read HtDP, I've read similar things.

I'm in my late 20s going for a second BS (this time in comp sci), and wanted to go through SICP on my own (plus the online lectures). I felt that I needed a bit of a warmup, though, and chose 'Concrete Abstractions' instead of HtDP. I'm satisfied with it so far.

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