Racket-on-Chez Status

Is there an update on what Racket decided to do with the proposal to deprecate the existing language syntax?

Racket was a great tool to teach people lisp and initiate them into that paradigm.

Is the main syntax still good for long term use?

They changed the name of the project from Racket 2 to Rhombus to make it clear that it was not about replacing Racket.

And even in the original announcment it was stated " * `#lang racket` is not going away and will always have its current parenthesis-oriented syntax. In the same way that Racket still supports `#lang scheme` and `#lang mzscheme` and even `(module mzscheme ....)` and even top-level programs, the Racket compiler and runtime system will always support `#lang racket` programs. We believe that Racket's `#lang`-based ecosystem makes it uniquely positioned for trying new language variants while preserving and building on our past investments."

They have only made that statement stronger since then.

I think the reason is more maintainability, when basing on a solid and faster other Scheme. It's much easier to write in terms of that other Scheme's primitives, than writing a C core, avoiding all kinds of C typical bugs. Furthermore, many improvements in Chez Scheme will carry over to Racket and the 2 communities might join forces in improving Chez and thus Racket in effect.

What that other Scheme is based on is a secondary consideration. Chez Scheme is also said to be implemented very well, however.

So will the current Racket language continue to be developed, as in new features, bug fixes and regular releases after Rhombus is released?

Renaming doesn't help the case much here, if Racket's future is abandonware.

A bit of Googling landed me here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/-x_M5wIht...

From there:

Phase 1: Brainstorming (months)

Phase 2: Iterative Design (years)

Phase 3: Conversion (months or years)

Phase 4: Transition (years)

I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Plus as a former Perl programmer having watched Perl 5 lost almost everything, chasing a never to have come to reality Perl 6. I can say, given all this, the future of Racket as a language, for its core uses and users is pretty much dead in the years to come. Like dead totally. Racket doesn't even have as much the share of dev mind share or a resource like CPAN at its disposal. Languages like Racket will fade away into oblivion a lot more quickly.

It can be hard to see this in all the enthusiasm in the early stages of the project. But when you embark on multi year project journeys. People's priorities change, people get into health crises, lose jobs, move on to better projects, recessions happen. Core teams that started these projects change so much, newer one's pretty much give up and see no point in it after a while. Many people prefer a perfectly working tool improved over time, than a pie-in-the-sky idea that will never come to see the light of the day. While all this is happening, your existing language, libraries, dev mindshare, tooling suffers. Merely supporting small time fixes means nothing, because no one likes to use a tooling in hospice care. Your core dedicated set of users, who did most of the evangelism for your cause move on to newer tools and languages, for the obvious reasons that they don't see their future with existing tool they like, the newer one is taking for ever and isn't even the same goodness as the current one. Once you lose those users, the newer users you wish to attract from the crowd of Java and Python programmers won't even bother to try, why should they? They have something proven to work in production with tooling, libraries, books, and production success stories for decades.

That is when you realize you lost both your old and new language.

Racket was awesome for what it was. An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp.

It's not late. Probably it's time to stop right now.