Racket News – Issue 31
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Racket News – Issue 31
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Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#2Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant
Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is that the language is more oriented to researcher than to get things done. Should I work in Northwest University, I would appreciate a lot those complexity and make progress in the field, but that is not my cup of tea now. I don't have problems to program in Haskell or any other language, but I don't buy racket complexity.
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#3A lot of new MIDI packages :p
rs(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.
fuzzy-search(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.
planning(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#4Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is th…
I'm not sure I understand what you said, but if you absolutely want to have "traditional" non-hygienic macros that manipulate Sexprs rather than syntax objects in Racket, you can: https://docs.racket-lang.org/compatibility/defmacro.html
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#5Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is th…
What don't you like about Racket macros? AFAIK Racket has the most advanced macro hygiene system out of any of the other languages you mentioned - it guarantees that all macros are hygienic by default, as opposed to other Lisps which require you to manually call (gensym) or use special syntax in your macro to guarantee that macro symbols don't shadow existing bindings.
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#6Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is th…
What don't you like about Racket macros? AFAIK Racket has the most advanced macro hygiene system out of any of the other languages you mentioned - it guarantees that all macros are hygienic by default, as opposed to other Lisps which require you to manually call (gensym) or use special syntax in your macro to guarantee that macro symbols don't shadow existing bindings.
From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion)
But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah.
(1) https://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/all.html
My personal opinion: I think racket is more an ivory tower for researcher, many for northwest university. “PLT” refers to the group that is the core of the Racket development team. PLT consists of numerous people distributed across several different universities in the USA.
As I am getting older I should prefer some middle ground between racket and go. Hygienic macros are difficult to understand in this context, that is I don't want to buy the power of hygienic macros, it is over sold.
Anyway, I admire Mattew Flatt efforts in compilation tecniques and the author of Beautiful Racket.
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#7Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don't look back to racket. /rant Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is th…
Racket provides a defmacro in its stdlib IIRC, and even if it didn't, you can trivially implement it using syntax-case or syntax-parse with syntax->datum (and the other way around).
You either don't really know what you're talking about, or you want to spread misinformation about Racket for some reason. I'd like to ask you to, in both cases, stop doing that.
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
What don't you like about Racket macros? AFAIK Racket has the most advanced macro hygiene system out of any of the other languages you mentioned - it guarantees that all macros are hygienic by default, as opposed to other Lisps which require you to manually call (gensym) or use special syntax in your macro to guarantee that macro symbols don't shadow existing bindings.
From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion) But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah. (1) https…
So, what is it that you don't like about Racket macros? The quote doesn't explain it. Is it the fact that there are some concepts to learn before you can use them effectively?
> that precludes hygienic macros.
The fact that you are so fixated on hygiene as problematic, but can't really explain why you think it's like this, is a huge red herring.
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#9Interesting[1]:
> This library defines disposables, composable first-class producers of values with associated external resources that must be allocated and deallocated such as database connections. Several safe abstractions are provided to consume disposable values while ensuring their associated resources are deallocated after use.
Apparently, disposable supplement custodians to work better for cleaning up externally allocated resources. I found the concept of custodians powerful, but not quite powerful enough, so it's good to see some work done in this area.
[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/disposable/Basic_Disposable_API...
Re: Racket News – Issue 31
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion) But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah. (1) https…
So, what is it that you don't like about Racket macros? The quote doesn't explain it. Is it the fact that there are some concepts to learn before you can use them effectively? > that precludes hygienic macros. The fact that you are so fixated on hygiene as problematic, but can't really explain why you think it's like this, is a huge red herring.
This is from you (1), it shows that you don't have any problem in managing your precious time:
(1) To be honest, the whole thing took me nearly a year to finish (including writing this post). I could work on it only once in a while, and I hit a few roadblocks which took many sessions to work around. I mentioned it briefly before, but getting Io code to compile was one such roadblock