A couple thoughts, not particularly well-organized, but in a more accessible form here than just tweeting at Alexis.
In all this discussion of "parens-less LISP", I find it slightly odd that nobody has mentioned Logo yet. I'm ambivalent about surface syntax, but it's not like this is a revolutionary idea. Since people are talking about running on different "VM" architectures, an LLVM backend would be lovely and gives WebAssembly for free. JVM support, on the other hand, seems like a particularly poor time investment, since (1) there is no shortage of options for functional programmers, and (2) the only real advantage of running on JVM is if you can provide interoperability with the massive Java ecosystem, but that's essentially incompatible with working around the JVM's bad architectural decisions. The elephant in the room for any Scheme running on the JVM is that (a) cross-function tail call elimination is incompatible with the security model; (b) trampolining everything is bad for performance and, more importantly, makes interoperability miserable (have fun writing all your Java code that calls Racket code in manual CPS-style); and (c) throwing everything into a massive state machine while-loop with gotos is both a static analysis nightmare and breaks the JIT optimizer due to single-method bytecode size restrictions. As someone who loves the Racket philosophy and language-oriented-programming, but who is also very interested in building large-scale practical systems, the single biggest obstacle to me using Racket over other functional languages (mostly Scala/Dotty) for personal projects is the lack of static typing (Typed Racket feels very much like a second-class citizen in the ecosystem). My deepest dream would be for Racket2 to have static type-checking as the default, with opt-in Rust-like affine types for programs that need precise resource management. Essentially any other outcome is "fine, I guess". -- 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/0e71f4c5-da98-4fcc-aed9-03a2bd547994%40googlegroups.com.
