Hello, my 1st post here...by 'accident' I stumbled upon Floss Weekly episode about Racket, liked it, visited web sites, read few posts (Why Lisp? Why Racket? is *very* inspirational), watched some RacketCon videos, skimmed over mailing list archive...and now have a question.
For some time I am considering which language to use for some open-source hobby project, iow. multi-platform desktop app. In recent years, for whatever reason, I was playing with Haskell - like FP paradigm, but noticed it's not very popular for GUI desktop apps and the state of GUI bindings is not thrilling. Explored some other languages like D, OCaml, Ada...but, amongst other things, all of them seems to be not the best fit for desktop app.[1] Of course, one alternative would be to simply use Python and try to speed up critical parts with Cython or something similar, but writing lot of unit tests to circumvent lack of decent type system is no go for me. Otoh, I want to be productive and avoid fiddling with low(er)-level stuff which excludes C(++) and I was never fan of Java and its VM. At the end, I considered Go mostly due to nice tooling support (I also use Hugo -static site generator), active community, but being aware that its type system is lacking. Now, after I've found out about Racket which includes multi-platform abstracted GUI library (as well as static-site generator - Frog as well as Pollen), I wonder if it's capable to be used for 'general' desktop app? In one blog post (http://dafoster.net/articles/2013/03/01/notes-on-racket/) I've found the following: "Sadly, RacketGUI lacks some advanced controls I often want: trees tables containing controls in cells However the list-box% control supports cells that only contain text. tree-tables " so I wonder if it's still the same status and/or whether there are plans to improve it? Seeing that originally Racket's GUI was based on wxWidgets, I wonder how much the present GUI is lacking in terms of GUI functionality in comparison with wx? For the app's back-end I plan to use Sqlite3 which is, afaict, covered by Racket. Similarly, we have need to call 3rd party C lib for calculating planetary ephemeris that should be easy as well. So, it looks, (almost) everything is there present in Racket, so I wonder whether you consider that writing desktop GUI app is suitable niche for Racket making one productive and still getting decent performance? Does using Typed Racket improve things significantly? I did graduate software engineering long ago and was using/learning several languages from Fortran, Pascal, C(++), but when I was about to learn Lisp, all students had to take Prolog course, so I'm Lisp/Scheme/Racket noob except that I wrote several setq-s when configuring Emacs. Considering that I like learning from books, do you recommend Realm of Racket book to start learning along with the online docs? Any other book? Sincerely, Gour Footnotes: [1] I did look at Dylan as well and although the language is interesting, but the project is simple lacking man power. -- The embodied soul may be restricted from sense enjoyment, though the taste for sense objects remains. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
