6 ms·

Documentation and educational material is where Racket is unbeatable: https://docs.racket-lang.org/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/index.html. The per

Documentation and educational material is where Racket is unbeatable: https://docs.racket-lang.org/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/index.html. The performance is around Python / general scripting level; perfectly acceptable. As you guessed, DrScheme became DrRacket. You can find more info at https://www.racket-lang.org https://www.racket-lang.org, presented much better than I could do here.

fuzztester 3y ago
Thanks.
klibertp 3y ago
Docs - oh boy. 90% of contributors to Racket are educators with many decades of experience teaching. The quality, depth, organization, interlinking, examples, references to papers... basically everything about Racket docs is at the level you just don't see anywhere else. Both the reference and guide are works of art. You get Realms of Racket and Beautiful Racket on top of that. Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation you'd find on the same shelf as SICP. How to Design Programs should be mandatory reading (and an antidote for the mind) for every OOP-focused dev out there (though, by the time they're "OOP-focused" they're most likely a lost cause anyway...) What's funny here is that Racket includes an OOP system, which is also described with incredible detail and thoughtfulness. The way they derive mixins from first-class anonymous classes is beautiful and enlightening. I've learned so much from docs.racket-lang.org that no other single resource can even begin to compare. Performance: closer to Groovy, Clojure or Raku than to Python, Ruby or JS. That is, startup is not as fast, but execution after that is decent. For a few years, performance improvements were not the focus of development due to the migration from custom VM to Chez Scheme. Now Racket on Chez is the default and I think we'll see further improvements on that front (easier maintenance and better potential performance were the reasons behind the migration IIRC.) The community is small, and the core strength of Racket is not something normal programmers use in day to day programming (that strength being the ability to shape the syntax and semantics of your code at will, ad hoc, anytime, with no friction at all, in any way you want). On the other hand, the results of giving that power to a bunch of very smart people are really worth seeing.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  Interesting, thanks.

fuzztester 3y ago

Thanks.

klibertp 3y ago

Docs - oh boy. 90% of contributors to Racket are educators with many decades of experience teaching. The quality, depth, organization, interlinking, examples, references to papers... basically everything about Racket docs is at the level you just don't see anywhere else. Both the reference and guide are works of art. You get Realms of Racket and Beautiful Racket on top of that. Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation you'd find on the same shelf as SICP. How to Design Programs should be mandatory reading (and an antidote for the mind) for every OOP-focused dev out there (though, by the time they're "OOP-focused" they're most likely a lost cause anyway...) What's funny here is that Racket includes an OOP system, which is also described with incredible detail and thoughtfulness. The way they derive mixins from first-class anonymous classes is beautiful and enlightening. I've learned so much from docs.racket-lang.org that no other single resource can even begin to compare. Performance: closer to Groovy, Clojure or Raku than to Python, Ruby or JS. That is, startup is not as fast, but execution after that is decent. For a few years, performance improvements were not the focus of development due to the migration from custom VM to Chez Scheme. Now Racket on Chez is the default and I think we'll see further improvements on that front (easier maintenance and better potential performance were the reasons behind the migration IIRC.) The community is small, and the core strength of Racket is not something normal programmers use in day to day programming (that strength being the ability to shape the syntax and semantics of your code at will, ad hoc, anytime, with no friction at all, in any way you want). On the other hand, the results of giving that power to a bunch of very smart people are really worth seeing.

fuzztester 3y ago
Interesting, thanks.