[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Stephen Smith]

Hmm, you've got me thinking more now - maybe leave the command-line until 
later. I certainly don't want to scare them off in the first chapter. I'm 
so used to installing packages via raco I didn't even think of using 
DrRacket.

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 7:18:33 PM UTC-4, HiPhish wrote:
>
> I don't know where you are going with your book, but are you sure forcing 
> people to use the command-line interface is a good idea? Racket can be 
> fully used through the GUI (even managing packages can be done through 
> DrRacket). I agree with explaining both DrRacket and raco, but why can't 
> users just pick the one they are more comfortable with and ignore the other 
> (and maybe come back later to it)?
>
> I think the biggest problem is that so many people have very low computer 
> literacy. You will never see a book or web tutorial explaining concepts 
> like clicking, right-clicking, drag or double-clicking because those 
> are so essential to using a computer. However, few people know how to use 
> the CLI, even though it allows you to automate and combine things in a way 
> a GUI cannot. You don't even have to be a programmer to find the CLI useful.
>
> On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:57:46 PM UTC+2, Stephen Smith wrote:
>>
>> 2. @HiPhish: "Users should learn the command-line first". Although I 
>> agree with this in almost any other context, my book is for people who have 
>> never programmed before. So they will be learning the command-line and GUI 
>> at the same time (they have no choice in the matter ;-). In my opinion 
>> though, raco is an essential command line tool to teach new Racketeers so 
>> at least in my case the GUI alone will not suffice. And my book is not 
>> really a "Racket" book per se - Racket is just a tool to achieve the end 
>> goal. Which probably requires further explanation ...
>>
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Stephen Smith]

You've gone above my pay-grade. :-)

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 1:05:17 PM UTC-4, Geoffrey Knauth wrote:
>
> On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 12:57:46 PM UTC-4, Stephen Smith wrote:
>>
>> It's been a long tough road as to which implementation language to choose 
>> for it. I'm down to two now after much experimenting - Racket of course, 
>> and Smalltalk.
>>
>
> Now you have me wondering which is harder, implementing Smalltalk in 
> Racket, or the other way around. 
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[HiPhish]

I don't know where you are going with your book, but are you sure forcing 
people to use the command-line interface is a good idea? Racket can be 
fully used through the GUI (even managing packages can be done through 
DrRacket). I agree with explaining both DrRacket and raco, but why can't 
users just pick the one they are more comfortable with and ignore the other 
(and maybe come back later to it)?

I think the biggest problem is that so many people have very low computer 
literacy. You will never see a book or web tutorial explaining concepts 
like clicking, right-clicking, drag or double-clicking because those 
are so essential to using a computer. However, few people know how to use 
the CLI, even though it allows you to automate and combine things in a way 
a GUI cannot. You don't even have to be a programmer to find the CLI useful.

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:57:46 PM UTC+2, Stephen Smith wrote:
>
> 2. @HiPhish: "Users should learn the command-line first". Although I agree 
> with this in almost any other context, my book is for people who have never 
> programmed before. So they will be learning the command-line and GUI at the 
> same time (they have no choice in the matter ;-). In my opinion though, 
> raco is an essential command line tool to teach new Racketeers so at least 
> in my case the GUI alone will not suffice. And my book is not really a 
> "Racket" book per se - Racket is just a tool to achieve the end goal. Which 
> probably requires further explanation ...
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Geoffrey Knauth]

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 12:57:46 PM UTC-4, Stephen Smith wrote:
>
> It's been a long tough road as to which implementation language to choose 
> for it. I'm down to two now after much experimenting - Racket of course, 
> and Smalltalk.
>

Now you have me wondering which is harder, implementing Smalltalk in 
Racket, or the other way around. 

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Stephen Smith]

Lots of good advice and opinions here. Thanks everyone. I'll try to respond 
to all of them in some way ...

1. @David K. Storrs and @Eric Eide: Renaming the folder. This works for 
sure but _my_ preference is to use a symlink (as Eric also mentioned) as it 
doesn't touch the original folder layout. On a Mac I simply use 'ln -s 
/Applications/Racket\ v6.12/ /usr/local/racket' and then add 
'/usr/local/racket/bin' to my path (via one of the .bash* files or 
/etc/paths for a system-wide setting). /Applications/Racket as a symlink 
also works. This is the approach I will likely take in the book as I 
believe that maintaining the original folder layout is a good practice to 
teach newcomers (and that's what symlinks were invented for, right? :-). 
Though for experienced users, renaming the folder is certainly just as 
effective as you'll probably know how to handle problems that can arise 
from taking that approach.

2. @HiPhish: "Users should learn the command-line first". Although I agree 
with this in almost any other context, my book is for people who have never 
programmed before. So they will be learning the command-line and GUI at the 
same time (they have no choice in the matter ;-). In my opinion though, 
raco is an essential command line tool to teach new Racketeers so at least 
in my case the GUI alone will not suffice. And my book is not really a 
"Racket" book per se - Racket is just a tool to achieve the end goal. Which 
probably requires further explanation ...

3. @Matthew Butterick: my (book) project is for model railroad hobbyists 
(many if not most who have never programmed before). I want to teach them 
to build a computer-based model railroad. I'm currently helping to maintain 
www.railwayoperationsimulator.com (a C++ project) which is a signalling 
simulator. I stumbled on that project while looking for ideas on how to 
model track and decided to hang around for awhile :-). My book will focus 
on a couple of different types of simulation though. 

I've had the project in the works for several years now. I've only just 
recently had the opportunity to work on it in any serious capacity. It's 
been a long tough road as to which implementation language to choose 
for it. I'm down to two now after much experimenting - Racket of course, 
and Smalltalk. Heavily inspired by htdp and I've just started to look at 
Beautiful Racket. Former contenders were C++ (wxWidgets), Rust, Ada, 
Eiffel, Tcl/Tk and Pascal (using FreePascal and Lazarus). I've taken the 
approach to writing the first chapter in both Racket and Squeak Smalltalk. 
I'll post those up when they are complete, and see what kind of response I 
get from potential readers as to which language is more likely to work 
best. If I get ambitious enough I may try to write two books simultaneously 
though I'm sure most would discourage me from doing that (and rightfully 
so). I just find both approaches have so many advantages - it's very 
difficult to choose just one.

Cheers,
Stephen Smith.

On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 3:51:07 PM UTC-4, Stephen Smith wrote:
>
> Authoring a new Racket book (targeting all platforms and non-programmers) 
> and having to tell users to quote paths with spaces to be able to use the 
> command-line tools seems distracting and an unnecessary complexity to 
> impose on them.
>
> Reference this post: 
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-users/2-ASoQ03x9Q/AXQyV4MTx0EJ by 
> Matthew Johnson.
>
> From a *nix perspective, it just seems like 'bad practice' to have folder 
> names with spaces? Though, devil's advocate, I get that underscores or 
> combined words can be unsightly, especially on a Mac where there are 
> hard-core design people to contend with (I can hear them now, "It doesn't 
> look nice in Finder" :-) but for Mac apps that have command-line tools it 
> seems more common to not have spaces in the folder name leading to a bin 
> folder.
>
> Is there a particular reason why Racket uses a space in its folder name?
>
> Cheers,
> Stephen
>
>
>
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Geoffrey Knauth]

Very interesting, good to know when I'm writing my own scripts, vs. using 
things others have written.  Thanks.

On Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 6:58:04 AM UTC-4, HiPhish wrote:
>
> BTW, on the topic of writing robust shell scripts, I always have a linter 
> run over my scripts when I save them. I run Shellcheck automatically in 
> Neovim using the Neomake plugin. The linter catches among other things 
> missing quotations.
>
> https://www.shellcheck.net/
> https://github.com/neomake/neomake/
>
> You can run Shellcheck manually over the CLI if you cannot set up your 
> editor to do it automatically.
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Geoffrey Knauth]

I understand the argument that strengthening our own CLI and shell-script 
practice to guard against spaces in filenames is both learned and good 
defense, as in, "don't go into battle without some armor protection."  I do 
that when I'm really worried, and if you want to see how big shell scripts 
can get dealing with this, just look at the lengths to which many GNU 
scripts go to work safely in the jungle of filesystems and user preferences.

What I've found though, unless I'm actually using those greatly fortified 
GNU scripts and tools, is that sometimes ordinary pipelines on the CLI can 
get tripped up by spaces.  So my approach has been to disarm the shooter, 
take the gun way, i.e., remove the space and replace it with a hyphen.

I apologize, my beloved Racket, I don't mean to suggest in any way that you 
are a shooter, you most certainly are not, you are most benevolent, even as 
you are powerful.  I'm only talking about the space.

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[HiPhish]

BTW, on the topic of writing robust shell scripts, I always have a linter 
run over my scripts when I save them. I run Shellcheck automatically in 
Neovim using the Neomake plugin. The linter catches among other things 
missing quotations.

https://www.shellcheck.net/
https://github.com/neomake/neomake/

You can run Shellcheck manually over the CLI if you cannot set up your 
editor to do it automatically.

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Matthew Butterick]

On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 12:51:07 PM UTC-7, Stephen Smith wrote:
>
> Authoring a new Racket book (targeting all platforms and non-programmers) 
>
>
Great idea! Are there more details you can share about the project?

-- 
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.

Re: [racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[HiPhish]

The benefit is that it looks nicer on the eyes in a GUI. I presume OP is 
talking about the Racket installation you get off the Racket website, and 
that installation is targeted at GUI users. I myself prefer the 
command-line and I use Racket via Homebrew, so I never even come across 
this issue.

Visual appeal is also why Lisp languages use the hyphen as a separator in 
names, it looks nicer on the eye. The reason most languages use the 
underscore is because the hyphen would be interpreted as the binary minus 
operator. Fun fact: in his original Lisp paper McCarthy allowed for spaces 
in symbols and used commas as separators, see page 9 of this PDF:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf

On Friday, March 30, 2018 at 4:44:26 PM UTC+2, David K. Storrs wrote:
>
> I look at it the other way:  there are clear benefits to NOT having 
> names containing characters that need to be quoted, so any use of such 
> characters has an opportunity cost.  What benefit does the space 
> provide that outweighs that opportunity cost? 
>

-- 
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.

Re: [racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[David Storrs]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 5:54 PM, HiPhish  wrote:
> I think you are trying to solve the wrong problem. If people want to use a
> command-line tool they should know how to use the command line first. They
> don't have to know every arcane feature of the Bourne Shell, but knowing to
> escape spaces or quote strings is the bare minimum. Think about it like
> this: if you are trying to give someone directions you already assume they
> know how to drive a car, right? If you want to write a book on Racket, then
> focus on Racket. And if they cannot use the command-line they can still use
> the GUI tools.
>

I look at it the other way:  there are clear benefits to NOT having
names containing characters that need to be quoted, so any use of such
characters has an opportunity cost.  What benefit does the space
provide that outweighs that opportunity cost?


> On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 9:51:07 PM UTC+2, Stephen Smith wrote:
>>
>> Authoring a new Racket book (targeting all platforms and non-programmers)
>> and having to tell users to quote paths with spaces to be able to use the
>> command-line tools seems distracting and an unnecessary complexity to impose
>> on them.
>
> --
> 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.

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[JCG]

Count me in as a person who renames racket installations without spaces.

It is more prudent to design file names without special characters, 
escapes, or quotes.  Otherwise, any shell script that might otherwise work 
on most unix file names may fail.  It's just not worth the hassle guessing 
if all of a system's scripts will be compatible.  As an example, AWK 
scripts used in a pipe are quite susceptible to surprise when one field 
appears as two.  Ditto for 'sort +k ...'.   

A further reason to eschew spaces in file name is documentation.   Having a 
space in a file name within prose is quite likely going to suffer a 
confusing line split. 

Thanks,
JG

>
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[HiPhish]

I think you are trying to solve the wrong problem. If people want to use a 
command-line tool they should know how to use the command line first. They 
don't have to know every arcane feature of the Bourne Shell, but knowing to 
escape spaces or quote strings is the bare minimum. Think about it like 
this: if you are trying to give someone directions you already assume they 
know how to drive a car, right? If you want to write a book on Racket, then 
focus on Racket. And if they cannot use the command-line they can still use 
the GUI tools.

On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 9:51:07 PM UTC+2, Stephen Smith wrote:
>
> Authoring a new Racket book (targeting all platforms and non-programmers) 
> and having to tell users to quote paths with spaces to be able to use the 
> command-line tools seems distracting and an unnecessary complexity to 
> impose on them.
>

-- 
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.

[racket-users] Re: Why is there a space in the path to the Racket application on MacOSX?

[Eric Eide]

David Storrs  writes:

> Second the desire for this not to be the case.  Personally, my
> solution is just to rename the folder after installing it.  I am
> currently working with binaries from
> /Applications/Racket_v6.11/bin/...

FWIW, I make a symlink (with no spaces in the name) and always use that in my
config files, scripts, etc.

Bonus: When I update the installation, I just recreate the symlink and point it
at the newly installed software.

(PS --- I don't like the spaces in the name, either!)

-- 
---
Eric Eide   . University of Utah School of Computing
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~eeide/ . +1 (801) 585-5512 voice, +1 (801) 581-5843 FAX

-- 
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.