You are so right, Neil, I've been slowly learning more and more idiomatic Racket. Some things I've picked up:
1) avoid mutators (see above) 2) avoid side-affects, use return values 3) Use list comprehensions and other powerful procedures (for*, for/list, foldl, map, etc) 4) Don't be afraid to write tiny procedures while you are feeling your way through a problem/solution. 5) Use the interactions pane in DrRacket to work on code with test inputs 6) Use the check and test procedures from the test-engine/racket-tests module 7) more to be learned! It's a great feeling to take a clunky imperative solution and transform it into a sleek functional solution! -Joe On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Neil Van Dyke <n...@neilvandyke.org> wrote: > A good thing about exercises coming from an introductory textbook is that > they are usually appropriate for the material instruction that the student > has received at that point in the book. (Ideally, there is a mostly linear > progression through the book.) > > However, if one is still looking for additional beginner programming > exercises, I think that one not-totally-bad option is to start picking > standard algorithms and data structures one can learn about by search the > Web and in books (e.g, sorting, shuffling, searching, stringmanipulating) > and trying to implement some of those. Remember to make good unit test > cases, and to verify your implementation both against your own > understanding of what it should do, and against the output of other > credible implementations you find. > > When finding algorithms on the Web and in books, be aware that most code > and pseudocode examples you'll see will have pieces like "set variable x to > the value of x + 1", and that Racket will indeed let you implement it just > like that -- "(set! x (+ x 1))" -- but at some point you should also learn > to implement these algorithms functionally, without using mutators like > "set!". So don't spend too much time learning "set!" to death by > transliterating every bit of code you find in every one Knuth's books -- > instead, learn "set!", and then move on to learning how to *not* use "set!". > > Neil V. > > -- > http://www.neilvandyke.org/ > > ____________________ > Racket Users list: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/**users <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users> >
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