I don't mind the parentheses. But I think Racket is kind of bloated and fragmented (I'm new to Racket, but this is the impression that I got so far). There are a lot of forms that are doing similar but slightly different things (e.g., the many let forms), and features that are not well integrated (the OO system comes to mind). I think it is amazing that all the features and forms that Racket provides can be reduced to a small set of core forms, but programmers don't write programs in the core forms, and I think it is the responsibility of the language designer to carefully craft a small set of forms and features that a programmer can use directly to solve most of the "ordinary programming problems" productively. Otherwise, personal extensions will flourish, and the ecosystem will be unnecessarily fragmented.
On Friday, August 2, 2019 at 6:44:41 AM UTC-4, Hendrik Boom wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 02, 2019 at 01:49:23AM -0700, Yongming Shen wrote: > > On the topic of making Racket 2 more appealing to new users. As a new > user > > myself, I have one (likely uninformed) suggestion: > > > > Design and promote a "boring core subset" that an experienced programmer > > can pick up easily and be as productive as when using an "ordinary > > programming language", without writing any macros. Macros are awesome, > > language-oriented programming is also awesome, if Racket 2 without them > can > > be as appealing (minus third-party library aspects) to programmers as > > Python/Ruby/Go/..., then Racket 2 plus them will certainly win hearts. > > If you ignore the ability to define macros, isn't Racket already more > or less what you propose? Except, perhaps, for all the parentheses? > > -- hendrik > -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/ddbbb0d0-89b5-4738-8eda-dc5dccdb6581%40googlegroups.com.
