On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 06:07:40PM -0400, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote: > 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:
I found a page about Honu here: https://docs.racket-lang.org/honu/index.html It looks elegant. But I'd have to try it out on some serious problem to see if it's as elegant as it looks. > > - 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. I'd start "porting" the main language over. It's essential to get early experience with nontrivial use. > - 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. You would wnt a fork, if only to keep the *large* collection of existing #lang racket users ans developers happy. If you are careful in maintaining line-by-line integrity between Racket documentation and Honu documentation, you might not find it difficult to merge Racket documentation updates into the Honu documentation repository. And you would want to be able to autogenerate *three* manuals: a Racket manual, a Honu manual, and a manual for both together. It's quite likely people will want to use the two together. > - 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/20190721133827.625ekvgc74aya5sy%40topoi.pooq.com.
