Lots of good advice and opinions here. Thanks everyone. I'll try to respond to all of them in some way ...
1. @David K. Storrs and @Eric Eide: Renaming the folder. This works for sure but _my_ preference is to use a symlink (as Eric also mentioned) as it doesn't touch the original folder layout. On a Mac I simply use 'ln -s /Applications/Racket\ v6.12/ /usr/local/racket' and then add '/usr/local/racket/bin' to my path (via one of the .bash* files or /etc/paths for a system-wide setting). /Applications/Racket as a symlink also works. This is the approach I will likely take in the book as I believe that maintaining the original folder layout is a good practice to teach newcomers (and that's what symlinks were invented for, right? :-). Though for experienced users, renaming the folder is certainly just as effective as you'll probably know how to handle problems that can arise from taking that approach. 2. @HiPhish: "Users should learn the command-line first". Although I agree with this in almost any other context, my book is for people who have never programmed before. So they will be learning the command-line and GUI at the same time (they have no choice in the matter ;-). In my opinion though, raco is an essential command line tool to teach new Racketeers so at least in my case the GUI alone will not suffice. And my book is not really a "Racket" book per se - Racket is just a tool to achieve the end goal. Which probably requires further explanation ... 3. @Matthew Butterick: my (book) project is for model railroad hobbyists (many if not most who have never programmed before). I want to teach them to build a computer-based model railroad. I'm currently helping to maintain www.railwayoperationsimulator.com (a C++ project) which is a signalling simulator. I stumbled on that project while looking for ideas on how to model track and decided to hang around for awhile :-). My book will focus on a couple of different types of simulation though. I've had the project in the works for several years now. I've only just recently had the opportunity to work on it in any serious capacity. It's been a long tough road as to which implementation language to choose for it. I'm down to two now after much experimenting - Racket of course, and Smalltalk. Heavily inspired by htdp and I've just started to look at Beautiful Racket. Former contenders were C++ (wxWidgets), Rust, Ada, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk and Pascal (using FreePascal and Lazarus). I've taken the approach to writing the first chapter in both Racket and Squeak Smalltalk. I'll post those up when they are complete, and see what kind of response I get from potential readers as to which language is more likely to work best. If I get ambitious enough I may try to write two books simultaneously though I'm sure most would discourage me from doing that (and rightfully so). I just find both approaches have so many advantages - it's very difficult to choose just one. Cheers, Stephen Smith. On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 3:51:07 PM UTC-4, Stephen Smith wrote: > > Authoring a new Racket book (targeting all platforms and non-programmers) > and having to tell users to quote paths with spaces to be able to use the > command-line tools seems distracting and an unnecessary complexity to > impose on them. > > Reference this post: > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-users/2-ASoQ03x9Q/AXQyV4MTx0EJ by > Matthew Johnson. > > From a *nix perspective, it just seems like 'bad practice' to have folder > names with spaces? Though, devil's advocate, I get that underscores or > combined words can be unsightly, especially on a Mac where there are > hard-core design people to contend with (I can hear them now, "It doesn't > look nice in Finder" :-) but for Mac apps that have command-line tools it > seems more common to not have spaces in the folder name leading to a bin > folder. > > Is there a particular reason why Racket uses a space in its folder name? > > Cheers, > Stephen > > > > -- 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.
