I may be out of place here as I am a total beginner to programing. In a matter of fact, I just pick up HTDP from Amazon to teach myself programing. Respectfully, IMHO if you want to increase the popularity of Racket. You can’t just place racket as another me too language like python, etc. You must show, what problems does Racket solve or make exponentially easier that makes the risk of spending the time to learn, apply and deploy a racket based software solution to solve real life problems worth it. A good example of what I mean is Yaron Minsky presentation about why Jane Street uses OCaml. Even someone like me, who can’t even program an excel spreadsheet and who has never used a computer for more than social media can understand clearly the reasoning behind Minsky choice of OCaml. Minsky clearly explains the problems that OCaml solves or makes exponentially easier and uses real life examples in his presentation. In short, he answers the WHY!
Why should someone choose Racket to learn programing as opposed to another language such as Python? What problems do organizations, small business, and start up face that would make the risk of choosing Racket worth it? What issues are prevalent in the software industry, that using Racket alleviates as compared to another language? Where are the real world examples of Racket being used to solve problems? What is a programable programing language and how does it make my life easier as compared to other languages? What is language oriented programming? If the racket community has already answered these questions, where would a person go to find out such things? Etc, Etc, Etc Respectfully, I would also concentrate on Rackets web presence. If I was to google any of the popular languages, I would find the answer to these questions in spades, with real life applications, and examples. You can also compare Pythons website to Rackets. Pythons website seems to be design more for advertising Python. If I go to the Pythons web page there is a section “use Python for” in it, it has various topics such as web development, GUI development, scientific and numeric, with all the applicable packages needed. If you knew nothing about Python, but where interested in using it for web development, it easy to see where to go, etc. Conversely if I was to google Racket, the answers are not as clear. If you go to the Rackets web page, it not clear what I can use Racket for. I would have to dig deeper into Rackets websites to see if Racket would be a suitable solution to the problem I am trying to solve. Respectfully Rackets website, while nice, seems to place Racket more towards educational/ toy language purposes, while Pythons website seems to place Python more towards industrial real world uses. I am just a beginner, and I have nothing but a superficial knowledge of Racket, computing, or the software industry. My intention is not to attack or belittle the hard work put into racket by members, so I hope I don’t come off that way. As a beginner, I just wanted to share my perspective in the difficulty in choosing Racket as my first language to learn add my 2 cents to the conversation. On Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 6:53:41 PM UTC-5, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > > This might be a bad idea, and normally I disapprove of this sort of > thing, but... does anyone want to take on the job of RACKET EVANGELISM > STRIKE FORCE, among a concentration of startup-types and other software > practitioners? > > Specifically, you'd participate regularly in Y Combinator's popular > "Hacker News" Web forum, "https://news.ycombinator.com/";, and, when the > not-unusual occasion to mention/show a strength of Racket presents > itself, do so. > > I occasionally see Racket mentioned on HN, but not nearly as often as it > legitimately could be. > > (There are also other strategic targets for the RACKET EVANGELISM STRIKE > FORCE operator or cell, and I recall Eli Barzilay and others active on a > lot of them years ago, but HN might be first priority right now.) > > -- 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.
