Matthew Butterick wrote on 12/26/18 1:50 PM:
I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think
it would be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted
to these stories that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside &
outside academia). This could be done in an interview-style format,
like Jesse Alama's recent book about language-making in Racket [1].
Photos also.
These success stories on the Racket Web site sound like a good idea.
Or, even short testimonials, or even movie poster blurb one-liners, on
the Racket Web site, could also be good.
If one did these success stories on the Racket Web site, you could
promote them with post(s) to Hacker News and somewhere on Reddit (not
"/r/racket", unless you can get it cross-posted to where startup-types
are, or somehow to the default front page).
One caution: careful not to damn oneself with faint praise. The
interviewer/editor would need to find noteworthy and reasonably
current/big stories. It's pretty common (and I've done it myself) in
promotion of things with low adoption thus far to milk a few uses way
too much, and way past their freshness date.
I would be happy to contribute design & layout if a sufficiently
motivated collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted to conduct the interviews
& gather the material.
I'm maxed out on pro bono actual-work right now. ('My TED talk'
explains my role now: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q&t=4s";)
If no Racketeer with journalistic inclinations can make these success
story writeups happen, maybe one of the university Communications
offices wants to do a piece on some of the Racket research and the "open
science" aspects of it, including getting "technology transfer" quotes
from commercial users. And the Racket Web site could reproduce the
article, with permission. And then promote that URL on HN and wherever,
and followup with the grassroots evangelizing. (NEU PR people, for
example, have this and some Racket-related prestigious awards and
spreading international academic influence to brag about.)
I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack
Overflow, or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon.
But rather because it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of
the people who are persuadable.
You could be right. I was only thinking of how to reach people who'll
do startups, with low-investment grassroots effort that every Racketeer
could do.
(Reaching academics through research publications and prior Scheme/Lisp
awareness, and undergrads through HtDP, for about two decades now, has
not been converting to significant numbers of startups and other
companies that use Racket. I'm having flashbacks to earlier in Racket
history, when I was surprised that every MIT Course VI (CS & EE) ugrad
alum I encountered, despite having been taught Scheme in their
CS-formative years, thought Scheme was only a pedagogic language for
SICP problem sets. It's like Scheme made an unholy bargain, to let it
produce top intro CS textbooks, and we're foolishly fighting against the
curse side of that. :)
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