61–70 of 161 posts
Does anyone use Racket outside academia? Is it production ready (or friendly)? Especially Typed Racket.
I've been cautiously optimistic about Rhombus since the initial "Racket 2" controversy. I'd have preferred they went with something more like Wisp or Wraith, but it could be a lot worse. I am somewhat troubled by tricks that are "too magic", like this example from front page: class Posn(x, y) fun flip_all([Posn(x, y), ...]): [Posn(y, x), ...] flip_all([Posn(1, 2), Posn(3, 4)]) // ⇒ [Posn(2, 1), Posn(4, 3)] Why should…
The `[Posn(x, y), ...]` is a pattern that matches a list of positions. The `[Posn(y, x), ...]` is a template that produces a list of positions.
Is this a reincarnation of Pyret?
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TypeScript & Rust don't "look nice to work with" because they force you to write maintainable code that doesn't just stop working because of a random runtime error. In my opinion, Go looks nice to work with but actually is a hidden monster full of footguns.
Curious to read that because I’ve always had the opposite opinion of the above: Typescript looks nice to work with but the tool chain is horrible (this isn’t really Typescripts fault though, more a synonym of it having to compile to JS). Go looks horrible to work with (too simplified syntax) but is actually really nice because the tooling is (mostly) spot on and it’s simplified syntax weirdly helps with maintainabili…
Is it possible to have Hindley–Milner type system for a LISP?
This actually looks good. It's like a less-obtuse Haskell. At a glance the features seem to be just the right mix of functional programming paradigms and standard imperative programming.
The other day I saw someone describe writing Haskell as “programming with your elbows while listening to math rock”, which is awesome. I can see the need for a less-obtuse Haskell
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Thanks. It’s nice to see at least a few in the FP community recognize that Lisp dialects, with their parenthesis-ridden S-expressions, are hard to read and write.
It is hard to have empathy for a problem you don't have. I have only recently become open to the idea that people might legitimately experience pain using an unfamiliar syntax. For me, it is a non-issue. From Lisp to C to APL to Forth to Prolog, syntax was never an issue for me. I greatly enjoy learning languages with different approaches to syntax. It has never caused me pain. Only joy. Then again programming langua…
I do not find this myself, and it is a standard part of the design of a lot of commercial software: intentionally thinking about disabilities, impairments, and difficulties, and working on accommodating people who struggle with these things.
Examples:
* GUIs that flash the screen to signify a bell sounding for deaf users.
* Keyboard-operated GUIs for users with motor or sensory impairments who can't use pointing devices. (Blind users can't see a mouse pointer so can't use one.)
* UIs with alternate colour schemes for people with colour-blindness.
It has long been a source of irritation for me that FOSS tools are so resisitant to implementing this.
> I have only recently become open to the idea that people might legitimately experience pain using an unfamiliar syntax.
Good gracious. That is a surprise to me.
I love the _idea_ of Lisp and have written about it at length, but I find it, and APL, and many other languages, impenetrable.
For ordinary non-technical people, "algebra" is a synecdoche for "something that is really hard to understand".
Algebraic notation is just about the maximum level of mathematics that many non-specialists can handle. The idea of a letter or symbol standing for any number so that it is possible to reason about arithmetic without specifying the numbers being manipulated is brain-bending for the majority of people.
And yet, this is the sine qua non of programming languages. It's the first level you must master.
C is a very simple language. It has terse notations for common operations, such as incrementing a value.
It is not "low level". It vaguely represents the machine architecture of a PDP-11 from 50 years ago. It's nothing like any 21st century CPU. It is not "close to the metal". It is not "portable assembler".
But it's about as simple as a lot of people can handle, so thousands love it.
Go lower level -- to assembly language -- and you put off the majority of those who aren't genius-level.
Go higher-level, to matrix maths or to working directly in lists and ASTs, and you put off loads more.
Go sideways to working with stacks, like Forth, and you dissuade a load more.
Eliminate arithmetic precedence with RPN and you alienate thousands more. A few love their HP calculators, or Postscript, but most can't handle it.
And they might not know why they can't but they are angry when they are told to just ignore an unscalable wall. Put an impassable barrier in someone's path, tell them it will fade away and stop being noticeable, and what would you expect but anger and resentment?
This is why I argue that BASIC has great merit that is missing from things like Python. Not syntactic whitespace: Python mixes text with code in output, it forces beginners to deal with abstract concepts like "editors" and "files", plus the ubiquitous OOPS -- all things that are meaningless to beginners.
BASIC replaced this with the simple brilliance of _line numbers._
And so the pros hate it and take pride in hating it -- because contempt culture is endemic in software.
https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
C, also, is extremely dangerous, and this appeals to the machismo of stereotypically nerdy geek types, who lack the conventional signs of machismo.
Thus, take C, make it safe by removing all the dangerous bits, but keep that terse syntax, and the result is Java -- loved by thousands of workman coders who are untrained but like an easy tool. Much of world business is glued together in Java.
But it lacks the element of danger so the macho nerds detest it. Contempt culture again.
What if Racket and Python had a child? Rhombus represents much, much more to us Racketeers. It may quite possibly be the crown jewel of multi-paradigm meta-programming languages and most importantly, a possible solution to the 's-expression barrier'. Who knows, it might even make a dent in the LISP curse. And we were all hoping for this. We were all waiting for this. And so I applaud the enormous effort involved, and I hope it inspires people to try a different approach to programming, and to language in general. It represents an impressive achievement in terms of elegance, pragmatism/practicality and efficiency in a language built atop a very solid foundation, coming from one of the greatest lineage of programming languages in history.
Like many others, I have been waiting for a killer app, a real showcase of the power of language-oriented programming. I was secretly hoping Rhombus would become a catalyst to the production of something great. While the emergence of LLMs presents challenges, it doesn't have to seal the fate of amazing purely and proudly human innovations like this one. My GitHub account may be filled with Racket code few will ever use, but Rhombus gives me new inspiration.
Sure, the future of programming might involve neural networks programming CPUs and GPUs directly. We're getting there. Yesterday we were programming with cryptic machine language, today we program computers with increasingly natural syntax. Tomorrow we might just tell machines what we need. But that doesn't make what we're doing now any less significant or exciting.
We programmers aren't going anywhere just yet, and many of us will keep writing code because we love it, not just because we have to. And now we have this pinnacle of human ingenuity in the form of a beautiful language, a love letter to the art of programming by humans, for humans. Thank you.
This is racket's [rhombus], which might be an interesting second link here; it's a scheme, underneath, with the full power of Racket libs available. [`shrubbery`], the replacement for s-exprs, is pretty interesting, expanding s-expr simply with grouping, and then a separate infix-pass on top. I've been playing with using it as the basis for a separate language; it's in an interesting place in the AST space, especiall…
I really wish they had kept the old C-like Honu syntax rather that the Python-like Shrubbery. If Rhombus is supposed to be an educational language, copy-pasting and trying out new code is going to be a important part of ecosystem, and indentation based syntax is not ideal for that.