On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 9:53:35 AM UTC-4, Greg Hendershott wrote: > > > 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. >
Yup, saw the same thing, but, heh, the internet is nothing if not a fantastic straw man factory :) > 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." > Very astute observation re: the motivation for some to start looking around. I think I've personally made this a "tempest in a tea pot", and I now feel much better about continuing to be able to develop in #lang racket for a long, long time. However, one of my past frustrations is how good the lisp community has been at dividing and conquering itself. Being unfamiliar with some of Racket's unique benefits, I initially felt it was simply the best Scheme I could choose for professional development. Being 8 months into a large project in Racket, and seeing some of Racket's unique benefits more clearly now, I already know there are no other lisps that could currently lure me away, but folks who are just now looking may be getting a sense of some identity confusion. And I admit checkout out Chez Scheme a little more recently, but it would be too painful to give up Racket's benefits over Chez. I already spent 10 years with SML, Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Julia, among others, and concluded Racket was the best for me, so I really, *really* don't want to start that process again! > 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. > Please don't wait for the dust to settle Greg! While I think the Racket core team did a pretty poor job of communicating (only partly due to my ignorance) how someone who is primarily interested in using #lang racket should feel about continuing with #lang racket, my current (possibly naive?) sense is that I shouldn't be concerned. However, how I personally feel is irrelevant if enough other folks start looking around for lispier pastures :( -- 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/78d3b84c-9e96-40f9-bc0c-56fb8befce3e%40googlegroups.com.
