Neil Van Dyck wrote: >...There is little upside to advertising that you're using a >not-currently-mainstream platform, >even if your business itself is not secret. For now, >"The first rule of Racket Club is: don't talk about Racket Club."
As an old imperative style programmer come to Racket it surprises me that Racket hasn't become immensely more popular than it is (in the same way that Ruby has) . It surprises me that it isn't more widespread and popular because development in Racket seems a little easier, a little simpler and a little cleaner, Not just the functional jprogramming features and macros and first class functions etc.etc. but all those mundane things you need to do in a development project seem a little easier. There is less background noise. To give some relatively trivial examples (but the kind of thing developers in the real world do all the time): In Python to access the Win32 api you need to install the third party package win32api and for each update of Python a new version of win32api is needed. In Racket you simply have the "system" command or for my needs the "shell-execute" command. No third party package is required and there are no issues when Racket goes to the next version. In Ruby to interface to imagemagick I needed to install a Ruby gem Rmagick which is Ruby version specific and then set some environmental variables. In Racket I just took the old FFI and put the names of the Imagemagick dlls in it and everything worked like a charm and I'm not effected when Racket upgrades or imagemagick upgrades (as long as the name of the dll doesn't change). I'm wasting much less time in Racket getting all this background stuff up and running. So to me it seems only a matter of time till programmers discover that Racket is "programmer and developer friendly" and it becomes mainstream the way Ruby has (if for no other reason than its so much faster than Ruby). When I tell other programmers that I'm doing my project in Racket I do get a kind of blank stare back, but it seems to me, that the more developers say they are developing in Racket, the sooner it will go mainstream. Harry Spier ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
