Hi Matthew, As someone who (unintentionally) caused maybe some of the debate to get out of hand (or did I?) I would like to open by saying that both your last email to the prior thread and also this email are both very encouraging.
I'll skip everything else and jump straight to: Matthew Flatt writes: > How to Proceed > -------------- > > Ideally, we would first decide on whether we want to try changing > surface syntax ever. Then, only if we have enough consensus that it's > worth a try, we could move on to setting overall goals and picking a > roadmap. Finally, if the planing of the roadmap succeeds, we could > follow it while getting into the details. > > Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. We need concrete examples to > discuss the possibility of changing syntax, potential roadmaps to see > whether there's anywhere we want to go, and so on. Some of the > discussion will necessarily put a cart before a horse. Delving into > some details may incorrectly give the impression that prerequisites > are a foregone conclusion. We've seen all of that already, starting > with my attempt to open up the discussion in the middle of RacketCon > and probably continuing with this message. Perhaps we can just accept > that this is all okay in the spirit of working together. > > I originally thought that we should have a more specific process in > place for discussion at this point, but I think I've been proved > wrong. Let's just discuss, for now. I'll be posting more myself. For the sake of discussion, maybe it's easiest to just assume "Racket attempts a move to a Honu derivative" as its surface syntax, which I'll call ~Honu for now. (I'm not saying that we know that will happen, I just think it's a good place to start discussing.) As you have already said, this will not prevent the existance of "#lang racket" keeping the syntax many in the community (including myself) already love. As you said, changing the surface syntax is high-risk, possibly high-reward. I agree with that, though I think Racket is uniquely positioned to lower the risk dramatically *because* of the #lang infrastructure. Is a "try it before we fully buy it" approach maybe possible? Maybe, for one thing, this could reduce community anxiety and improve our chances to explore. Here, maybe is a way it could be done: - First, port the teaching languages and etc over to Honu. Try teaching some classes with just-Honu syntax. This is *before* trying to switch the "internals" of Racket over. - Encourage a large portion of the community to try to write as many tools using ~Honu as possible. How do people like it? What can be improved? - Begin switching the core docs over, maybe even as a fork. It might be a pain to maintain two doc forks, but maybe it is worth it. I suspect that Scribble might even make the task easier, since autogenerating two manuals from mostly the same source might not be too hard. - Switch all the default examples on racket-lang.org over to ~Honu. - Are people happy? Is this meeting their needs? Get community input. At this point, if the community is happy enough, and if it appears that *newcomers* (including in the educational space) are happy enough, now we can focus on switching the core Racket system over to ~Honu-as-the-basis. What do you think? This seems like a clean transition plan to me that also allows for us to test, readjust, and even allows us to "stage before we commit", which seems like a big win. Thoughts? - Chris -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/87tvbgz7f7.fsf%40dustycloud.org.
