Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[WarGrey Gyoudmon Ju]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 8:10 PM, Saša Janiška  wrote:

> Neil Van Dyke  writes:
>
> > Being non-mainstream for practitioners, Racket is most popular with
> > people who have the freedom to choose any tools they want, not forced
> > into a mainstream set of options. Most often this means individual
> > alpha techies, researchers, etc.
>
> That's true, but still wonder why not more hobbyist are using it.
>

AFAIK, when other developers(even users in this maillist) mention Racket,
they are talking about Scheme which is thought not designed for
practitioners. When they talk about the real world application of Racket,
they only know the Hacker News which is made in old scheme.

Racket has lots of great tools that you named above, however, hobbyists may
not buy it. Say, every developer does not like to write docs while hating
other developers who do not write docs. Perhaps the most important thing is
that the idea of "Embedding executable/testing code in the docs" is beyond
their practice (even beyond the Literate Programming).

I just made myself an opportunity to work as a full stack Racket developer
four months ago. This is also a good chance to show others that Racket is
powerful or at least not so bad even in their concerns (the roadmap of full
spectrum).

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Neil Van Dyke]

George Neuner wrote on 02/16/2016 02:16 PM:
The answer is a proper version control system that supports having 
multiple versions available - or better, in use - simultaneously.


+1  This is an improvement I would like in the new package system. It's 
important to my open source-friendly process story.


Neil V.

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Neil Van Dyke]

Nota Poin wrote on 02/15/2016 03:57 PM:


java bytecode is anything but inscrutable. There have even been decompilers 
written for it, as much as developers have tried to push them out of existence. 
It's basically assembly language,


It already literally was in the '90s. 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/jasmin-emacs/  :)


BTW, I was actually a Java early adopter (we were friends with Sun, back 
when it was called Oak, and for set-top boxes), and after Java was added 
to the mainstream browsers (sadly, not how it was in Sun's HotJava), I 
was an advocate, and wrote one of the first real application programs in 
Java outside of Sun, to show that Java could be used for application 
programming, during a phase when all the Web people thought it was just 
for animations and trivial "applets". (And decompilers go back that far, 
too, and one was played as a kind of protection, er, racket, with an 
obfuscator product.)  Turns out that Java didn't need my advocacy, but 
now I'm an early adopter again, saying that Racket also has some neat 
merits, but many mainstream programmers can't see past Java (which most 
of their mainstream counterparts 20 years ago temporarily dismissed).  I 
have similar stories about a couple other languages, currently in other 
phases of their rise arcs.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbfd75YRG34 (Don't blame the controller!)


They're referring to the infamous cheap MadCatz brand controller, dread 
of all friends invited over after school to play video games. With 
Racket, we want to you to use the same awesome $60 DualShock 3 model we 
use ourselves, and we go to some trouble to help you get acclimated, if 
you're accustomed to the MadCatz from your house.


Neil V.

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Gustavo Massaccesi]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 6:26 AM, Saša Janiška  wrote:
> "Jos Koot"  writes:
>
> Hello Jos,
>
>> I am a Racket-using hobbyist. It surprises me that, according to the
>> observation, not many hobbyists are using Racket.
>
> Seeing so much proliferation of JS crap it looks like people are really
> going insane. :-)
>

One advantage of JS is tht you can run it in every browser in every
computer in the word.

But it has a few disadvantages, so someone adds a thin wrapper to
improve some details and fix incompatibilities between browsers. Then
the wrapper gets more features, until it's contains an ad hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of
Common Lisp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Racket.

Part of the solution may be to get a Racket to JavaScript compiler. I
think there are two or three projects, with different advance level.

Gustavo

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Nota Poin]

On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 3:29:23 PM UTC, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Nota Poin wrote on 02/15/2016 05:40 AM:
> You seem to be itemizing complaints that come to your mind,

Sorry, I shouldn't have been complaining.

> but I don't 
> see how all of them are responding to the question you quoted, of "how 
> is it that such Wonderland is not discovered by much more people?"

I was trying to help him empathize with why people might be turned off to the 
language. I know I've spent many nights in ear bleeding frustration trying to 
deal with some of these problems.

> For example, this sounds like you're arguing against high-level 
> languages in general,

Languages in general suck, it's true. I was arguing against them as a way to 
show that the answer to the question why "nobody" knows about Racket has not a 
simple answer. "Racket has problem A, which people don't like. Except 
everything else does too, so I dunno."

> It's abstract, optimized at runtime, 
> inscrutable, not what you think it is, rewritten, transformed magic? Uh 
> huh, I'm just gonna go call a function in C thanks."

java bytecode is anything but inscrutable. There have even been decompilers 
written for it, as much as developers have tried to push them out of existence. 
It's basically assembly language, with instructions that need translation for a 
given platform. If you want to claim that Racket isn't the only language with 
crazy underlying runtime optimization that nobody really understands, pypy is a 
good example of that. It translates every possible python statement into C, 
compiles them, and then uses those bits of machine code to JIT new python code 
as loaded, which is freaking insane. You know how long it takes to compile C 
code for every possible logical pathway in python code?

> In language forums, people have mixed feelings about posts that are a 
> laundry list of complaints.

Sorry if I upset you. I'm not always in the most pleasant of moods. 

> Someone more industrious than me might later today try to address the 
> complaints one-by-one

Oh, please don't. They're poorly thought out opinions, and even if any manage 
to be valid and vitally important to address, you can rationalize anything, so 
people will address them just to show us all why bad is actually good, and 
we're the ones who are wrong, not the language or implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbfd75YRG34 (Don't blame the controller!)

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Robby Findler]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 2:29 PM, Matthew Butterick  wrote:
> On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 2:40:29 AM UTC-8, Nota Poin wrote:
>
>> Too powerful. It's a language that can define new languages from whole 
>> cloth. It's a compiler of compilers. It's like trying to use a jet engine to 
>> propel your tricycle.
>
> I would rather have a jet engine for my tricycle than a tricycle to tow my 
> jet.

One of those seems more life-threatening than the other, actually.

Robby

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Neil Van Dyke]

Nota Poin wrote on 02/15/2016 05:40 AM:
> [...]

You seem to be itemizing complaints that come to your mind, but I don't 
see how all of them are responding to the question you quoted, of "how 
is it that such Wonderland is not discovered by much more people?"


For example, this sounds like you're arguing against high-level 
languages in general, including languages like Java, which has been 
discovered by everyone: "... It's abstract, optimized at runtime, 
inscrutable, not what you think it is, rewritten, transformed magic? Uh 
huh, I'm just gonna go call a function in C thanks."


In language forums, people have mixed feelings about posts that are a 
laundry list of complaints.  Some complaints may be valid, some unclear, 
some just needing a quick pointer, some gravely mistaken-- but even when 
the forum breaks out each point for one-by-one discussion, it can turn 
into a pile of posts that people can't digest.  So then I think the 
people who have the least context for digestion (e.g., newest candidate 
adopters) often register the pile as a vague net-negative, which is 
really too bad.


Someone more industrious than me might later today try to address the 
complaints one-by-one (this tends to happen), but please give them a 
while on this date.  A master of parentheses is a master of the sensual, 
and so probably very tired on the morning after Valentine's Day.


Neil V.

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RE: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Jos Koot]

I am a Racket-using hobbyist. It surprises me that, according to the
observation, not many hobbyists are using Racket.

I did programming in a lot of languages, assemblers included, often creating
my own languages, even long before I met Scheme or Racket or other Lisp like
languages in which it is much easier to implement a new language.

Shortly after retiring, almost two decades ago, I decided to stick to Racket
(at that time PLT-Scheme). I use it to study my own ideas of making other
languages and to check that I am well understanding mathematical algorithms.

My work is not a big addition to Racket, but some of my tiny advices did
make it.

My next project is to transform program fragments considered bad in
 <https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html?q=performance>
https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html?q=performance
into code that would be accepted as good ones. Might be expensive at
expansion-time, but may improve run-time. Before starting this project I am
modifying my own Racket modules according to the advices in the above
reference. I must admit that much of my code makes offences against the
advices. Nevertheless it may help me to identify weak spots in poor code.

My 2 cents, Jos Koot



-Original Message-
From: racket-users@googlegroups.com [ <mailto:racket-users@googlegroups.com>
mailto:racket-users@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Neil Van Dyke
Sent: domingo, 14 de febrero de 2016 15:26
To: Saša Janiška; racket-users@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t



Saša Janiška wrote on 02/14/2016 07:10 AM:
> Neil Van Dyke <n...@neilvandyke.org> writes:
>
>> Being non-mainstream for practitioners, Racket is most popular with
>> people who have the freedom to choose any tools they want, not forced
>> into a mainstream set of options. Most often this means individual
>> alpha techies, researchers, etc.
> That's true, but still wonder why not more hobbyist are using it.

I don't know how many Racket-using hobbyists there are.  I have found,
via Google, references to various Racket programming not in the package
systems, such as in blogs, by people I don't recall from the email
lists.  So I wonder whether the people who go to the trouble to release
open source packages and/or who participate on the email lists, are
actually the minority of users (not counting students required to use
Racket for classes).

I did have a book in the works, on practical software engineering in
Racket, which had baked into the process and tools very-low-friction
selective open source sharing of pieces of a system.  Based on the ideas
of how I thought that would work and why, I have a suspicion that we're
losing a lot of what could be open source packages (and additional
visible users).

Neil V.

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Re: [racket-users] Re: (eqv? Racket-land Wonderland) -> #t

[Neil Van Dyke]

Saša Janiška wrote on 02/14/2016 07:10 AM:

Neil Van Dyke  writes:


Being non-mainstream for practitioners, Racket is most popular with
people who have the freedom to choose any tools they want, not forced
into a mainstream set of options. Most often this means individual
alpha techies, researchers, etc.

That's true, but still wonder why not more hobbyist are using it.


I don't know how many Racket-using hobbyists there are.  I have found, 
via Google, references to various Racket programming not in the package 
systems, such as in blogs, by people I don't recall from the email 
lists.  So I wonder whether the people who go to the trouble to release 
open source packages and/or who participate on the email lists, are 
actually the minority of users (not counting students required to use 
Racket for classes).


I did have a book in the works, on practical software engineering in 
Racket, which had baked into the process and tools very-low-friction 
selective open source sharing of pieces of a system.  Based on the ideas 
of how I thought that would work and why, I have a suspicion that we're 
losing a lot of what could be open source packages (and additional 
visible users).


Neil V.

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