I use Racket daily in production at Mercury Filmworks (Disney TVA,
Amazon, Netflix productions among others), and I wish I could talk more
about how Racket helps us where it counts. If there was to be an
evangelist, I'd be a candidate, however 1) I don't consider myself a good
Racket programmer, and 2) most of what I work on can't be published. That
said, I'd love to write a case study on our use in production, especially
Racket's role in replacing Python/Bash/Csh scripts with fast,
self-contained binaries. I use it for everything from video formats
handling (+ffmpeg) to automation to animation software plugins.
Dexter
On Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 3:51:21 PM UTC+1, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
>
> Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 7:40 AM:
> > How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, Perl,
> > Python, PHP, C++, Rust ?
>
> All of those had merits, were right place and at right time, and (except
> Rust) really spread when there was *a lot* less noise and sheer mass of
> stuff. Also, some of those had very long ramps to their ultimate
> popularity (which could give some hope to Racketeers).
>
> Ruby with Rails was a decent language that pushed a good model and
> automagical conveniences for Web developer productivity, and they seemed
> to have a good community (e.g., when I was shopping around for my new
> research platform language, and I don't think I'd even heard of Ruby at
> that time, one of the nice Ruby people happened to hear about my quest,
> and emailed me, suggesting Ruby).
>
> We talked about Perl growth spikes here recently.
>
> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension
> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another)
> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got
> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun for
> earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited HTML)
> while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially by
> Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl
> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)
>
> PHP was in the early Web gold rush, when template-ish approaches were
> attractive alternative to CGI scripts that started as Perl (or, less
> likely, other imperative language) code that spat out HTML strings. You
> could also do HTML templates various other ways, including in Perl, but
> the Web was so new, and the tools so not figured out, and everyone was
> racing to do neat stuff (or to get VC funding, then Herman Miller office
> furniture and launch party, and then IPO), that there was a lot of
> random going on, and we aren't in that kind of environment anymore.
> Well, unless you were pitching a "blockchain" startup during the BTC:USD
> run-up a year ago -- it didn't much matter what tools you grabbed, so
> long as you told the VCs you were doing "blockchain" (you didn't even
> have to madlibs pitch "Our startup is like _Uber_, for _cats_! (Can you
> handle the sheer force of our raw innovation, unleashed!)").
>
> C++ had the funding and promotional/endorsement backing of the people
> who brought us C and Unix, and (again) there was a lot less stuff, and a
> lot fewer programmers. The people using C were some of the most
> technically-skilled programmers: OS-level systems programmers (who also
> used assembler), Unix workstation technical application/research
> programmers, PC shrinkwrap software developers, and EEs doing software
> bits of embedded systems. (The corporate MIS programmers were a
> separate group -- they mostly did database forms and reports and
> business logic, and there seemed to be subgroups for different
> platforms. Much of the MIS seemed to be analogous to today's Web
> programmers, and I'm not sure how MIS platform adoption decisions were
> made in various kinds of organizations then.)
>
> Anyway, besides the Bell Labs / AT backing, I recall one thing that
> helped push C++ was the people doing GUI and hearing about OO (with
> references to Smalltalk), at a time when people were just reasoning
> low-level code and ad hoc formalisms, or using pre-OO analysis and
> design methods (structured SA and SD, ERDs, etc.), and it was really
> easy to sell generalization/polymorphism to those people. Plus AT was
> saying C++ would help with mission-critical and performance-critical
> large and complex systems, and you had workstation developers like
> Mentor Graphics endorsing it. Also, again, the amount of stuff and the
> number of programmers was a lot smaller then; one anecdote: by the time
> there was a Usenix C++ conference, it was small enough that, while
> Stroustrup was talking during a Q in the hotel conference room (maybe
> around the scale of current RacketCon), some toddler goes running up the
> aisle from the back of the room, saying something like "daddy!", and
> everyone laughs.
>
