[[ Note: I sent this yesterday but the Google list server bounced it.
Although I told Matthew I was fine leaving it that way, with only
him seeing it, he encouraged me to post it again. ]]
Thank you for replying, Matthew.
It sounds like surface syntax, other back-ends, and better tooling and
documentation are the available ideas for enabling more people to use
Racket.
Of these, the one for which you have energy and enthusiasm is as I said
before a valid and extremely important consideration.
Within that decision space I wouldn't prolong the discussion.
> Improved tooling also seems high-effort -- medium-risk --
> medium-reward. I'll defer to those who concentrate more on tools,
> including the author of Racket mode for Emacs, to suggest a priority
> for this one.
Speaking of that, I had some plans what to do next. Even explore some
modest open-source funding. But Sunday morning hit the Pause button.
On Twitter I'm seeing some parody of old, sour, inflexible lispers who
only love sexprs. You know, fighting the inevitable electric car, which
is apparently on their lawn. Funny and unfair, both.
Although there are many ways and reasons to caricature me -- and I
heartily encourage anyone to do so, it's great fun! -- this doesn't
happen to be one of them. I spent a couple decades with C/C++. As my
mid-life crisis, instead of buying a sports car I learned Racket and
Emacs. Sexprs weren't a big deal; the new (to me) concepts were. Yes,
I've grown to really enjoy sexprs for editing (paredit), richer
identifier names, and not needing to check the tiresome board game rules
for operator precedence. But it's not like I can't use C or JS or Rust
or Haskell or Python or whatever syntax productively, especially when
not creating macros. In fact I can use those syntaxes by, say, using
those languages.
So for me, it's more like, "Well. If Racket will change that way, and
I'm skeptical it will help adoption, that feels like an inflection
point; a nudge to look around. Maybe spend more time with Rust or
Haskell or X, for the next ~10 years."
I'm not saying this is strictly logical. It's how I feel now. I'm also
not claiming it should be any input whatsoever into decisions made,
except maybe to the extent I'm representative of more people (and maybe
not even then).
Even if I decided to spend less time with Racket, I expect it would be
more like a slow cross-fade. This is not an abrupt, "So Long and Thanks
for All the Standard-Fish" announcement. :)
But seriously I feel like I need to wait for the dust to settle, digest,
understand where things will be in a couple years.
---
To answer your question, things like paredit, parinfer and fructure are
very interesting. With respect to adoption? Paredit seems like something
people try/abandon several times before it "sticks". I did; four times.
Since he was RacketCon, I should have mentioned Phil Hagelberg's
wonderful comment: "If you don't think paredit is for you, then you need
to become the kind of person paredit is for." :) So my uninformed first
question is, are structured editing tools equally as hard/easy as text
sexprs, for beginners? And OMG what about people who've already learned
the "obvious" syntax? I don't know. I'll mull that over and other
tooling ideas.
And as I already mentioned in my talk, support for indentation probably
needs to be per-module not just per-lang.
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