Racket

Racket(racket-lang.org)

180 points by bdj 15 years ago | 46 comments

KirinDave 15 years ago |

We really need to give kudos to these guys. They have been persistent for years in developing a high quality Scheme, and then taking it to the next level. PLT Scheme is practical in its library design, flexible in its reader, meticulous in its documentation and fast as an execution engine.

Making a language fast and well-documented is a thankless task. It's nothing short of a herculean accomplishment for these guys to come out of left field with such a fantastic offering.

carterschonwald 15 years ago | |

so so so true. Whats doubly impressive is that many of the core active members are full time academics who are able to frame their research so that they can both spend their time improving their PLT/Racket, and framing their work as also being genuinely top notch research!

aufreak3 15 years ago | | |

Totally agree with both. They've taken great initiative and the criticisms that come with it. On top of all this, they create Moby which compiles to Javascript. If this were a concert, I'd give them a standing ovation.

angrycoder 15 years ago |

Now that is great rebranding.

All it needs now is 'try Racket in your browser' and a video of some dude making a blog in 15 minutes using Racket. Then it will be the new hotness.

jmatt 15 years ago | |

Yeah that is great rebranding.

All it needs now is 'try Racket in your browser' and a video of some dude making a blog in 15 minutes using Racket. Then it will be the new hotness.

You're using it now. Arc was built on top of PLT and news.arc ships with it. So,you are using the killer app / example that you are looking for right now.

EDIT: Clarification

ximeng 15 years ago | |

Not quite a video, and I think it will take a bit longer than 15 minutes, but here's their tutorial on making a blog.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/index.html

fleitz 15 years ago | |

Almost, you need a twitter client these days, blogs are passe.

What good is a language if you can't make yet another twitter client in 15 minutes.

_pius 15 years ago |

I love seeing framework or language homepages with good copy and design like this one. The best ones make you want to stop what you're doing in your favorite language and go code something with the new hotness right now.

skybrian 15 years ago | |

Unfortunately, it doesn't explain to the newcomer why this language is worth learning. I was expecting some kind of feature comparison or "Why another language?" article.

(That's a first impression. Then I read the comments here, and discovered it's based on PLT Scheme, which at least tell s me a little about what to expect.)

Jimmy 15 years ago | | |

It's not just based on PLT Scheme, it is PLT Scheme, rebranded.

hvs 15 years ago |

It'll be interesting to see where they go with this; there seems to be a conscious effort to downplay the words "Scheme" and "Lisp" on the landing pages. I'm more of a Common Lisper myself (at least for my personal development), but I've been impressed with the PLT Scheme environment and languages. And anything that increases the use of the lisp family of languages is, imo, a good thing.

Others will obviously disagree with that sentiment. :)

Confusion 15 years ago |

For reference:

Yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408292

Some months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221374

bandris 15 years ago |

"Racket's interactive mode encourages experimentation, and quick scripts easily compose into larger systems. Small scripts and large systems both benefit from native-code JIT compilation. When a system gets too big to keep in your head, you can add static types."

Impressive.

jey 15 years ago |

Weird that it doesn't mention that it's the language formerly known as PLT Scheme.

Ixiaus 15 years ago | |

Not really a "language" but an implementation of the Scheme programming language.

jey 15 years ago | | |

IIRC, the whole point of renaming it Racket is to show that PLT Scheme is "more than just scheme".

makmanalp 15 years ago | | |

My impression is that it goes way far and beyond the scheme standard with all its additional features.

gorm 15 years ago |

As if we are not already busy learning clojure?

spooneybarger 15 years ago | |

You're learning clojure and don't know scheme?

leif 15 years ago | | |

I actually did this.

Frigging worthless university programming courses didn't bother teaching scheme.

Learning scheme's libraries on my own along with the lisp paradigm proved too daunting before (or maybe I just never found the right toy project to stick with, not really sure). Having java libraries there to back me up (I was doing stuff with hadoop too, so that made sense) gave me the little leg up I needed to get over the hump.

morphir 15 years ago | |

write factorial in scheme, then in clojure. And you might see an very interesting difference. Hint: the jvm does not have tail call optimization.

fierarul 15 years ago | | |

As if somebody would pick Scheme over Clojure for tail call optimization alone.

Clojure has a lot of handy stuff and the fact that's built on top of the JVM (with its limitations, indeed) is a major plus.

lelele 15 years ago |

What I don't like about Racket (former PLT Scheme) is that it's a closed environment. You can't use common Scheme libraries (for instance: SLIB), debugging facilities are hidden into Racket's editor therefore you can't access them from Emacs or other tools, etc.

soegaard 15 years ago | |

There are some tools available for command line debugging: http://docs.racket-lang.org/errortrace/index.html?q=debuggin... http://docs.racket-lang.org/unstable/debug.html?q=debugging

SLIB has worked in the past. If there are specific parts of SLIB you need, try asking the mailing list for help.

ghb 15 years ago |

Any comments on how instructive HTDP is with Racket for introducing a non-programmer to coding?

rsheridan6 15 years ago | |

I did that years ago and found it to be very useful.

bad_user 15 years ago |

Is there anything like Practical Common Lisp for PLT Scheme?

elibarzilay 15 years ago | |

Not a standalone book, but there's a guide for doing practical things: http://docs.racket-lang.org/more/

jheriko 15 years ago |

Its cool, but I wonder just how many high-level web oriented languages we really need...

cgbystrom 15 years ago |

Languages aside, I don't think the world needs another VM. Can't people just target an existing one? Please?

chc 15 years ago | |

Your comment seems to imply that there is already a rich ecosystem of VMs in use, but there aren't really. Basically, there's the Java VM, which is bad for functional languages, and there's Mono, which is not really ideal for Scheme either, nor very popular except that it allows compatibility with .NET.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure PLT Scheme predates both Java and the CLI, so you'd be better off slagging Microsoft for their duplication.

Hexstream 15 years ago | | |

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llvm

samth 15 years ago | |

First, the Racket VM has been under development since 1995, so it's not "another VM".

Second, the Racket VM supports lots of things that other VMs don't: the Racket module system [1], kill-safe synchronization [2], custodians and eventspaces [3], first-class continuations, and many other things besides.

[1] Composable and Compilable Modules, Flatt 2002

[2] Kill-Safe Synchronization Abstractions, Flatt + Findler 2004

[3] Programming Languages as Operating Systems, Flatt et al, 1999

KirinDave 15 years ago | |

If the FFI is good, why do you care?

The PLT VM is very very good, and their FFI is very flexible. If you want a lispy dialect on the Java VM, you have one. But otherwise, why does it matter?