I just sent $2000 to become a sponsor of this year's RacketCon. That's an increase from the $1500 I put in last year, and $1000 the year before that.
I haven't been to all the RacketCons. But I know from going to the last few that Vincent St-Amour and Matthew Flatt have kept raising the bar. They do a great job. More sponsorship helps them both improve the event and keep the ticket price low for everyone. Because if you can get yourself to St Louis, you should be at RacketCon. But beyond that, sponsoring RacketCon is a great way to invest in the future of Racket. Because, like Soylent Green, Racket is made of people — people who find time in what are already busy professional and personal schedules to improve what, AFAICT, is the best programming environment in the world (or, as Matthias would say, second best). Because the people involved with Racket — they could get away with being jerks. Racket is that good. But, miraculously, they're not. They're kind and generous and modest. That's why RacketCon doesn't need a conference code of conduct. It would be superfluous. At Strange Loop, the code of conduct is "Act like you're involved with Racket." I want to emit a special gamma ray of gentle shame to those Racketeers who use Racket professionally, i.e. make money from it. Folks, Racket is one of the best deals we've ever gotten. It's easy to socialize costs and privatize profits — just ask YouTube and Netflix, who together consume half the bandwidth of the Internet so jackasses can binge-watch "Entourage." Are we not better than that? I contend that if you put $500 into RacketCon every year, Racket would still be the best deal you've ever gotten. Vincent is ready to receive your money at stamo...@eecs.northwestern.edu. I thank you. -- 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.
