On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 7:15 AM Alexis King <lexi.lam...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Jul 22, 2019, at 14:16, Dexter Lagan <dexterla...@gmail.com> wrote: > To say that Racket is so defined by its syntax that it will cease to be > distinguishable from any other language if it is changed is absurd, and it’s > frankly insulting to all the people who have put so much effort into every > part of Racket.
You have an advantage of being well invested in the Racket ecosystem already. How do you convince someone _else_, perhaps in industry, that Racket is interesting? It's pretty hard to say: "Look! Scribble and Typed Racket, and contracts, and 10 other things make up this really awesome ecosystem all running on a single VM, and they can all share code!" Why? Because it's a _lot_ to digest, a _lot_ to try to understand / invest in, and we live in a world where Go, a language that effectively contains only 1970s language technology, is dominating because of its simplicity and distinct lack of features. On the other hand, people look at parens, think Lisp, completely discount it because they heard "parens were really annoying to read," or had a bad experience in college, and then move on anyway. People judge a book by its cover, and they judge a language by its syntax. Growing a language community is _really, really, really hard_, and is only going to get harder as Racket grows in complexity, and other languages come up that have immediately familiar syntax, and a simple to understand core. A new syntax might checkmark the first point, but I kind of think that the #lang ecosystem, _might actually be doing a disservice_ to Racket. It's all the traditional complaints about macros "you have to learn the original author's DSL" mixed with "you have to learn the original author's half broken / buggy parser / syntax and quirks, the new semantics it adds on, _and_ the library that goes along with it, too." Oh, and "it's all mixed in with this other stuff written in #lang racket, with these silly parens. I AM CONFUSED!" Not sure how to resolve all this, and I'm sorry for lacking a central thesis in my reply, except to say that "syntax matters" and "Racket isn't easy" ... -- http://www.apgwoz.com -- 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/CADoGzserVCpTmxrOPRiTKabaHaN4O%3D1WKcbR_Wqga8E70k_c_g%40mail.gmail.com.
