Thanks for your extensive reply. I realized that I have based my opinions on Racket 6.7 and we are living in 7.1-era, which makes some (but not all) of my words a bit irrelevant (I was subscribed here for all this time, but it just... skipped my attention somehow). I will address few points below.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 12:24:59AM -0500, Philip McGrath wrote: > On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 1:48 PM Tomasz Rola <rto...@ceti.pl> wrote: > [...] > closest relatives: there is ongoing work to implement Racket in Chez > Scheme, and you will find some of the creators of Racket listed on the > cover page of R6RS. Ok, I guess this will suffice for me as sign of connection to the rest of Lisp-land. [...] > stuff) that it expects to be installed via the OS package manager, > but "Minimal Racket does not require additional native libraries to > run" <https://github.com/racket/racket/blob/master/INSTALL.txt>, and > you can configure things so that these are bundled with Racket > instead. Also, if you prefer, Racket can compile your scripts into > stand-alone executables, so you could just deploy the binaries if > that simplifies things. I think I will play with this "minimal Racket" idea. As of standalone execs, I will rather stay with scripts. [...] > The Racket Guide <https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/dialects.html> points > you to how to run pure R5RS and R6RS code in Racket: did you not see this, > or was it not sufficiently clear? The part of message stating about R5RS and R6RS was quite clear to me and for long time. What was not clear was if I should expect vanishing support for those dialects. But from what you have written, it seems like I do not have to worry too much about it. So now I have lots of potential worries shot at once, which is good. > (Of course, writing practical programs in pure portable RnRS Scheme > is hard, Acknowledged. I was there and it was 4 on 0-10 point PITA scale. > > Another niche for which I would like to consider R* is mobile apps > > (i.e. for smartphone). But, is it possible to do such thing, actually? > > > > Jay McCarthy has ported Racket to Android: > https://github.com/jeapostrophe/racket-android It should be possible to do > likewise for iOS, but I don't know of anyone who's done it yet. Wonderful. Really. [...] > > Python has an excellent "batteries included" motto. … > > Something which can talk to and make use of existing Python, > > Perl, Ruby code? Open up a spreadsheet, read data, feed it to Python > > library, write back results. … utilities/system > > programming and/or stuff like reading and manipulating data in files, > > databases and spreadsheets … And showing some controls for mouse. > > > > Not only can Racket do all of these things, I personally do essentially all > of them. "Batteries included" is written right at the top of Racket's > website <https://racket-lang.org/>. The main distribution comes with a Since I have visited that site in 6.7 days I can see it underwent a nice change. Despite the fact that others in this thread would like to improve it even more. > package for working with many databases > <https://docs.racket-lang.org/db/index.html>, and other packages add > support for others <https://docs.racket-lang.org/mongodb/>, as well > CSV spreadsheets > <https://docs.racket-lang.org/csv-reading/index.html>. I have been > using Racket to run Python programs under its control and talk to > them via standard IO in formats like JSON. I even use Racket's `raco > setup` tool to manage the Python dependencies, and I'm working on > integrating the Python docstrings into Racket's Scribble > documentation. > In Racket itself, I maintain a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and > GNU/Linux) GUI app, a server-side web application (including proxies > and virtual hosts managed from within Racket), and various utilities > for managing a large corpus of XML documents. Very interesting. The thought of puppeting one interpreter from another one is kind of hypnotizing me. And this (whole paragraph) is the kind of stuff that would have kept me interested in Racket during last two years, should I know about it (of course I am not blaming you, or anybody else, but this is how things mishappen, mostly my own lack of initiative plus circumstances). > The Racket language has compelling features (e.g. continuations, > contracts, green threads, DSLs) that make it more effective and > productive for my purposes than any other language I've encountered. Yep, I realize that. Since we are coming out, I have for years written small and low-medium utils in various scripting languages. But writing one or two of them in Elisp (it - or Emacs - can be utilised in such role) was quite an eye opening experience. There were some limitations to such "scripting" - no exec funcall (at least not in E24, AFAIK), and no easy way to process files in pieces (and the hard way was uninteresting). Still, it convinced me that I should invest some time into doing more scripts in such way. I rarely use the word but if Racket can be utilised for this, it is quite exciting. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** -- 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.
