Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Matthias Felleisen]

Can you speak in general terms at RacketCon? 



> On Apr 16, 2019, at 3:02 PM, dexterla...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
>   I use Racket daily in production at Mercury Filmworks (Disney TVA, Amazon, 
> Netflix productions among others), and I wish I could talk more about how 
> Racket helps us where it counts. If there was to be an evangelist, I'd be a 
> candidate, however 1) I don't consider myself a good Racket programmer, and 
> 2) most of what I work on can't be published. That said, I'd love to write a 
> case study on our use in production, especially Racket's role in replacing 
> Python/Bash/Csh scripts with fast, self-contained binaries. I use it for 
> everything from video formats handling (+ffmpeg) to automation to animation 
> software plugins.
> 
> Dexter
> 
> On Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 3:51:21 PM UTC+1, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 7:40 AM: 
> > How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, Perl, 
> > Python, PHP, C++, Rust ? 
> 
> All of those had merits, were right place and at right time, and (except 
> Rust) really spread when there was *a lot* less noise and sheer mass of 
> stuff.  Also, some of those had very long ramps to their ultimate 
> popularity (which could give some hope to Racketeers). 
> 
> Ruby with Rails was a decent language that pushed a good model and 
> automagical conveniences for Web developer productivity, and they seemed 
> to have a good community (e.g., when I was shopping around for my new 
> research platform language, and I don't think I'd even heard of Ruby at 
> that time, one of the nice Ruby people happened to hear about my quest, 
> and emailed me, suggesting Ruby). 
> 
> We talked about Perl growth spikes here recently. 
> 
> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension 
> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another) 
> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got 
> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun for 
> earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited HTML) 
> while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially by 
> Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl 
> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.) 
> 
> PHP was in the early Web gold rush, when template-ish approaches were 
> attractive alternative to CGI scripts that started as Perl (or, less 
> likely, other imperative language) code that spat out HTML strings.  You 
> could also do HTML templates various other ways, including in Perl, but 
> the Web was so new, and the tools so not figured out, and everyone was 
> racing to do neat stuff (or to get VC funding, then Herman Miller office 
> furniture and launch party, and then IPO), that there was a lot of 
> random going on, and we aren't in that kind of environment anymore.  
> Well, unless you were pitching a "blockchain" startup during the BTC:USD 
> run-up a year ago -- it didn't much matter what tools you grabbed, so 
> long as you told the VCs you were doing "blockchain" (you didn't even 
> have to madlibs pitch "Our startup is like _Uber_, for _cats_!  (Can you 
> handle the sheer force of our raw innovation, unleashed!)"). 
> 
> C++ had the funding and promotional/endorsement backing of the people 
> who brought us C and Unix, and (again) there was a lot less stuff, and a 
> lot fewer programmers.  The people using C were some of the most 
> technically-skilled programmers: OS-level systems programmers (who also 
> used assembler), Unix workstation technical application/research 
> programmers, PC shrinkwrap software developers, and EEs doing software 
> bits of embedded systems.  (The corporate MIS programmers were a 
> separate group -- they mostly did database forms and reports and 
> business logic, and there seemed to be subgroups for different 
> platforms.  Much of the MIS seemed to be analogous to today's Web 
> programmers, and I'm not sure how MIS platform adoption decisions were 
> made in various kinds of organizations then.) 
> 
> Anyway, besides the Bell Labs / AT backing, I recall one thing that 
> helped push C++ was the people doing GUI and hearing about OO (with 
> references to Smalltalk), at a time when people were just reasoning 
> low-level code and ad hoc formalisms, or using pre-OO analysis and 
> design methods (structured SA and SD, ERDs, etc.), and it was really 
> easy to sell generalization/polymorphism to those people.  Plus AT was 
> saying C++ would help with mission-critical and performance-critical 
> large and complex systems, and you had workstation developers like 
> Mentor Graphics endorsing it.  Also, again, the amount of stuff and the 
> number of programmers was a lot smaller then; one anecdote: by the time 
> there was a Usenix C++ conference, it was small enough that, while 
> Stroustrup was talking during a Q in the hotel conference room (maybe 
> around the scale of 

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[dexterlagan]

  I use Racket daily in production at Mercury Filmworks (Disney TVA, 
Amazon, Netflix productions among others), and I wish I could talk more 
about how Racket helps us where it counts. If there was to be an 
evangelist, I'd be a candidate, however 1) I don't consider myself a good 
Racket programmer, and 2) most of what I work on can't be published. That 
said, I'd love to write a case study on our use in production, especially 
Racket's role in replacing Python/Bash/Csh scripts with fast, 
self-contained binaries. I use it for everything from video formats 
handling (+ffmpeg) to automation to animation software plugins.

Dexter

On Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 3:51:21 PM UTC+1, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
>
> Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 7:40 AM: 
> > How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, Perl, 
> > Python, PHP, C++, Rust ? 
>
> All of those had merits, were right place and at right time, and (except 
> Rust) really spread when there was *a lot* less noise and sheer mass of 
> stuff.  Also, some of those had very long ramps to their ultimate 
> popularity (which could give some hope to Racketeers). 
>
> Ruby with Rails was a decent language that pushed a good model and 
> automagical conveniences for Web developer productivity, and they seemed 
> to have a good community (e.g., when I was shopping around for my new 
> research platform language, and I don't think I'd even heard of Ruby at 
> that time, one of the nice Ruby people happened to hear about my quest, 
> and emailed me, suggesting Ruby). 
>
> We talked about Perl growth spikes here recently. 
>
> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension 
> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another) 
> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got 
> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun for 
> earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited HTML) 
> while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially by 
> Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl 
> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.) 
>
> PHP was in the early Web gold rush, when template-ish approaches were 
> attractive alternative to CGI scripts that started as Perl (or, less 
> likely, other imperative language) code that spat out HTML strings.  You 
> could also do HTML templates various other ways, including in Perl, but 
> the Web was so new, and the tools so not figured out, and everyone was 
> racing to do neat stuff (or to get VC funding, then Herman Miller office 
> furniture and launch party, and then IPO), that there was a lot of 
> random going on, and we aren't in that kind of environment anymore.  
> Well, unless you were pitching a "blockchain" startup during the BTC:USD 
> run-up a year ago -- it didn't much matter what tools you grabbed, so 
> long as you told the VCs you were doing "blockchain" (you didn't even 
> have to madlibs pitch "Our startup is like _Uber_, for _cats_!  (Can you 
> handle the sheer force of our raw innovation, unleashed!)"). 
>
> C++ had the funding and promotional/endorsement backing of the people 
> who brought us C and Unix, and (again) there was a lot less stuff, and a 
> lot fewer programmers.  The people using C were some of the most 
> technically-skilled programmers: OS-level systems programmers (who also 
> used assembler), Unix workstation technical application/research 
> programmers, PC shrinkwrap software developers, and EEs doing software 
> bits of embedded systems.  (The corporate MIS programmers were a 
> separate group -- they mostly did database forms and reports and 
> business logic, and there seemed to be subgroups for different 
> platforms.  Much of the MIS seemed to be analogous to today's Web 
> programmers, and I'm not sure how MIS platform adoption decisions were 
> made in various kinds of organizations then.) 
>
> Anyway, besides the Bell Labs / AT backing, I recall one thing that 
> helped push C++ was the people doing GUI and hearing about OO (with 
> references to Smalltalk), at a time when people were just reasoning 
> low-level code and ad hoc formalisms, or using pre-OO analysis and 
> design methods (structured SA and SD, ERDs, etc.), and it was really 
> easy to sell generalization/polymorphism to those people.  Plus AT was 
> saying C++ would help with mission-critical and performance-critical 
> large and complex systems, and you had workstation developers like 
> Mentor Graphics endorsing it.  Also, again, the amount of stuff and the 
> number of programmers was a lot smaller then; one anecdote: by the time 
> there was a Usenix C++ conference, it was small enough that, while 
> Stroustrup was talking during a Q in the hotel conference room (maybe 
> around the scale of current RacketCon), some toddler goes running up the 
> aisle from the back of the room, saying something like "daddy!", and 
> everyone laughs. 
>

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

['Paulo Matos' via Racket Users]

On 31/12/2018 19:09, Stephen De Gabrielle wrote:
> 
> On a related tack, I've started writing a '7 reasons why your next
> project should be in built on Racket' let me know if you would be
> interested in providing feedback.  (My inspiration was a similar post
> for Python)
> 

How's this going? Let me know if I can provide any feedback.

-- 
Paulo Matos

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Tomasz Rola]

Thanks for your extensive reply. I realized that I have based my
opinions on Racket 6.7 and we are living in 7.1-era, which makes some
(but not all) of my words a bit irrelevant (I was subscribed here for
all this time, but it just... skipped my attention somehow). I will
address few points below.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 12:24:59AM -0500, Philip McGrath wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 1:48 PM Tomasz Rola  wrote:
> 

[...]
> closest relatives: there is ongoing work to implement Racket in Chez
> Scheme, and you will find some of the creators of Racket listed on the
> cover page of R6RS.

Ok, I guess this will suffice for me as sign of connection to the rest
of Lisp-land.

[...]
> stuff) that it expects to be installed via the OS package manager,
> but "Minimal Racket does not require additional native libraries to
> run" , and
> you can configure things so that these are bundled with Racket
> instead. Also, if you prefer, Racket can compile your scripts into
> stand-alone executables, so you could just deploy the binaries if
> that simplifies things.

I think I will play with this "minimal Racket" idea. As of standalone
execs, I will rather stay with scripts.

[...]
> The Racket Guide  points
> you to how to run pure R5RS and R6RS code in Racket: did you not see this,
> or was it not sufficiently clear?

The part of message stating about R5RS and R6RS was quite clear to me
and for long time. What was not clear was if I should expect vanishing
support for those dialects. But from what you have written, it seems
like I do not have to worry too much about it. So now I have lots of
potential worries shot at once, which is good.

> (Of course, writing practical programs in pure portable RnRS Scheme
> is hard,

Acknowledged. I was there and it was 4 on 0-10 point PITA scale.

> > Another niche for which I would like to consider R* is mobile apps
> > (i.e. for smartphone). But, is it possible to do such thing, actually?
> >
> 
> Jay McCarthy has ported Racket to Android:
> https://github.com/jeapostrophe/racket-android It should be possible to do
> likewise for iOS, but I don't know of anyone who's done it yet.

Wonderful. Really.

[...]
> > Python has an excellent "batteries included" motto.  …
> > Something which can talk to and make use of existing Python,
> > Perl, Ruby code? Open up a spreadsheet, read data, feed it to Python
> > library, write back results. … utilities/system
> > programming and/or stuff like reading and manipulating data in files,
> > databases and spreadsheets … And showing some controls for mouse.
> >
> 
> Not only can Racket do all of these things, I personally do essentially all
> of them. "Batteries included" is written right at the top of Racket's
> website . The main distribution comes with a

Since I have visited that site in 6.7 days I can see it underwent a
nice change. Despite the fact that others in this thread would like to
improve it even more.

> package for working with many databases
> , and other packages add
> support for others , as well
> CSV spreadsheets
> . I have been
> using Racket to run Python programs under its control and talk to
> them via standard IO in formats like JSON. I even use Racket's `raco
> setup` tool to manage the Python dependencies, and I'm working on
> integrating the Python docstrings into Racket's Scribble
> documentation.
> In Racket itself, I maintain a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and
> GNU/Linux) GUI app, a server-side web application (including proxies
> and virtual hosts managed from within Racket), and various utilities
> for managing a large corpus of XML documents.

Very interesting. The thought of puppeting one interpreter from
another one is kind of hypnotizing me. And this (whole paragraph) is
the kind of stuff that would have kept me interested in Racket during
last two years, should I know about it (of course I am not blaming
you, or anybody else, but this is how things mishappen, mostly my own
lack of initiative plus circumstances).

> The Racket language has compelling features (e.g.  continuations,
> contracts, green threads, DSLs) that make it more effective and
> productive for my purposes than any other language I've encountered.

Yep, I realize that. Since we are coming out, I have for years written
small and low-medium utils in various scripting languages. But writing
one or two of them in Elisp (it - or Emacs - can be utilised in such
role) was quite an eye opening experience. There were some limitations
to such "scripting" - no exec funcall (at least not in E24, AFAIK),
and no easy way to process files in pieces (and the hard way was
uninteresting). Still, it convinced me that I should invest some time
into doing more scripts in such way.

I rarely use 

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Tomas, thank you for your helpful comments.  I just wanted to comment on 
a couple side points right now.


Tomasz Rola wrote on 12/29/18 1:48 PM:
I understand Racket community no longer considers themselves as part 
of Scheme landscape, but I am unable to say where I get this 
impression from.


I've been one of the people propagating that, for two reasons:

1. That was the impression I got of the intention of the name change 
from PLT Scheme, and I guessed it was a time to be a team player. :)


2. Many of the most savvy developers will immediately want to use 
"standard Scheme", not "embrace proprietary variants". But 
standard Scheme was a really great baseline foundation -- just not 
sufficiently as a complete general-purpose production language. So 
people were shooting themselves in the foot by trying to get by with 
R5RS and SRFIs.


(I say this as one of those foot-sharpshooters.  When I picked Scheme as 
my next language platform for rapid R, I started writing missing 
essential libraries and tools for it, and I went to a great deal of 
trouble to keep them portable, and to test with maybe 10 different 
Scheme implementations, with some scripts to package for a few of them.  
Eventually, I decided I was handicapping myself too much, so I switched 
to developing in PLT Scheme only, but always knowing how to switch to 
Gambit, Kawa, Chicken, Guile, or some other Scheme implementation with 
different strengths that I might need.  I announced this, maybe a few 
other Scheme and other Lisp people followed me to PLT, and some others 
who focused on non-PLT Schemes took up repackaging some of my libraries 
for those. The choice of PLT turned out to be a good one.)


(That said, RnRS is done by great people, and I think it would be good 
if all the Scheme variants could find a common svelte baseline again, 
and to continue to explore a diversity of different approaches and goals 
atop that baseline.  Then, for a comprehensive "standard library" today, 
I'd favor a more decentralized model. Some of it perhaps much like 
SRFIs, but maybe a little closer to IETF RFC and STD, combined with de 
jure "standards" of the day based on current popularity of open source 
libraries, some of which might eventually might turn into something like 
RFC/STD.  For example, given a baseline language, many libraries from 
Racket, Scheme48, and elsewhere might simply be used, and that's enough, 
and some might go through an RFC or STD process beyond that.  In any 
case, standardization efforts people care about tend to be a massive 
amount of work, especially when there's community involvement, and I do 
not envy those who heroically take on that task.)



BTW, maybe jobs using Racket will also encourage a lot more quality contributions of 
packages, when there's the additional motivation of open source "auditioning" 
for jobs, in addition to the current community participation, platform promotion, and 
love of craft.

Forget it. I think this is standing a problem on its head.


That "BTW" was not suggesting how to create jobs, but speculating a 
major reason why Rust-like contributions growth might happen once jobs 
exist (and why Racket hasn't yet seen that degree of sustained 
contributions).


(I have a holistic development model in mind that should give you 
optional open source contributions almost for free (doing things you'd 
do anyway for your project's and organization's immediate needs).  But 
that kind of organizational altruism/alignment/PR contribution, together 
with individual purely altruistic or collaborative contributions, are 
not the only kind or motivation of contributions -- another motivation 
is marketing of individual developers.   Individual marketing via open 
source (and blog posts, etc.) has been a thing since at least the start 
of Web popularity, but seems to be more of a standard practice than it 
used to be.)


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Philip McGrath]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 1:48 PM Tomasz Rola  wrote:

> Where does Racket belong? I understand Racket community no longer
> considers themselves as part of Scheme landscape, but I am unable to
> say where I get this impression from. If I am wrong, then the first
> thing for anybody willing to contribute to R* success would be to make
> their blog being displayed on Scheme Planet (IMHO). If I am right (R*
> not Scheme), then this is a pity.


There's much to discuss here, and much of it would start to get off-topic
for this thread, but I can give a few facts for the record.

Racket is a language in the Scheme branch of the Lisp family. Racket
includes implementations of the R5RS
 and R6RS
 Scheme languages, and
programs/libraries written in those languages can interoperate with code in
other Racket languages, but the main Racket language isn't Scheme. Racket
is both more than and different from the languages specified by any of the
Revised Reports in numerous ways, ranging from immutable pairs and
guaranteed left-to-right evaluation to the large standard library,
cutting-edge macro system, and multi-lingual programming support (which
enable those implementations of R5RS and R6RS), to name just a few. The
Racket language evolved from PLT Scheme: a blog post
 gives more of the rationale for the
change, but basically it's called something different because it is
something different. That said, Schemers are still some of Racketeers'
closest relatives: there is ongoing work to implement Racket in Chez
Scheme, and you will find some of the creators of Racket listed on the
cover page of R6RS.

Right now I am willing to write some scripts, with intention to run
> them both on Linux and OpenBSD. A kind of stuff that is normally
> written in Perl. … This means I will have to have source at my hand, just
> install *BSD,
> compile Gauche, install my scripts, ready to go, before any network is
> up I mean.
>
> Does Racket match such a use case? I can compile it from sources
> … but I wonder if it will
> compile in a very limited, rugged environment - no network connection,
> just what was there in base install (with C compiler, of course). I
> might try one day, but it seems Gauche has less dependency on outside
> packages than R*.
>

Racket can certainly do this. You do not need a network connection either
to compile Racket itself or to compile code written in Racket (provided, of
course, that you have all of the sources you need). On (non-Mac) Unix-like
systems, Racket does by default use some shared libraries (e.g. for GUI
stuff) that it expects to be installed via the OS package manager, but "Minimal
Racket does not require additional native libraries to run"
, and you can
configure things so that these are bundled with Racket instead. Also, if
you prefer, Racket can compile your scripts into stand-alone executables,
so you could just deploy the binaries if that simplifies things.


> Like, I write a program
> and hope it will keep working for the next few years without much work
> (other than bug fixing). Thus, language stability is important to
> me. Or backwards compatibility. Or at least knowing I can switch to
> alternative implementation, should I ever feel such necessity.
>

Being concerned about backwards-compatibility is very reasonable! Others
can speak more to their actual experience, but the Racket developers take
compatibility very seriously, and I've heard of people running quite old
code with the latest releases of Racket. Read through the documentation and
you will see lots of evidence for this in various APIs: for example, `#lang
scheme` still runs PLT Scheme programs from before the name change.

The Racket (PLT Scheme) project started in 1995 and has been publishing
regular releases for decades, so the possibility of abandonment seems
vanishingly small.

As far as I can see it, Racket contributes to fragmentation of Scheme
> scene (which is already a "everybody tends for oneself" kind,
> AFAICT).


Since, as noted, Racket is a different language than Scheme, this becomes
rather like saying that C++ contributes to fragmentation of C
implementations.


> There is no clear message if there is way to run in R* a code
> developed with other Schemes or vice versa and a very minimalistic
> effort to portability in a form of slib library is not going to work
> in R*, am I right?
>

The Racket Guide  points
you to how to run pure R5RS and R6RS code in Racket: did you not see this,
or was it not sufficiently clear? (Of course, writing practical programs in
pure portable RnRS Scheme is hard, but I don't think it's harder in
Racket's Scheme implementations than in others.) Racket also comes with
implementations of many SRFIs 
.

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Jens Axel Søgaard]

Den lør. 29. dec. 2018 kl. 19.48 skrev Tomasz Rola :

> and last but not least,
>
> http://scheme.dk/planet/
> http://planet.lisp.org/
>
>
Apropos - if you want your blog on Planet Scheme, send me a mail.

/Jens Axel

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Tomasz Rola]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 7:40 AM:
> >How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails,
> >Perl, Python, PHP, C++, Rust ?
> 
> All of those had merits, were right place and at right time, and
> (except Rust) really spread when there was *a lot* less noise and
> sheer mass of stuff.  Also, some of those had very long ramps to
> their ultimate popularity (which could give some hope to
> Racketeers).
[...]
> Why I suggested focusing outreach on Hacker News (and maybe I've
> talked about it more recently on "racket-money" than "racket-users")

What follows are just my thoughts, not a critique of Racket (I am
unwilling to criticize without suggesting how to improve things and it
always irritates me when someone just says "you wrong" and never
explains, so I am not saying "you wrong", ok?). More like, summary of
my position with regard to R* and some loose thoughts about improving
its adoption. Very subjective. And, being short on time, as usually, I
may write here about something already mentioned in this thread, so if
yes sorry for that.

I guess the kind of people on HN (and https://lobste.rs/ , another
place I regurarly attend) take their time and do a research by
themselves. Evangelism would do nothing to them (judging by myself, at
least), but interesting story tagged as "Show", a project using
Racket, that is another thing. But it is "the story, a project, what
is it" first, and only then "written in Racket".

Another places I frequent are various types of aggegators under the
name "Planet":

http://planet.emacsen.org/
http://www.planeterlang.com/
http://planet.haskell.org/
http://ocaml.org/community/planet/

and last but not least,

http://scheme.dk/planet/
http://planet.lisp.org/

Where does Racket belong? I understand Racket community no longer
considers themselves as part of Scheme landscape, but I am unable to
say where I get this impression from. If I am wrong, then the first
thing for anybody willing to contribute to R* success would be to make
their blog being displayed on Scheme Planet (IMHO). If I am right (R*
not Scheme), then this is a pity. I will cope just fine, but consider
the fate of Lush, a very interesting Lisp dialect. A very capable, if
I can judge without really trying it. And their latest-latest news is
from 2009:

http://lush.sourceforge.net/

Right now I am willing to write some scripts, with intention to run
them both on Linux and OpenBSD. A kind of stuff that is normally
written in Perl. But to be frank, two months ago I tried again writing
some smaller utility in Perl and ended up writing said util in gawk. I
know I am not stupid, but I have to avoid Perl. So the plan is to
write those utils in Gauche, because it seems to have what I need and
can take R5RS (for a while).

This means I will have to have source at my hand, just install *BSD,
compile Gauche, install my scripts, ready to go, before any network is
up I mean.

Does Racket match such a use case? I can compile it from sources
(actually, living on a very dated Debian I have no other way to stay
current, so I not only can but actually do) but I wonder if it will
compile in a very limited, rugged environment - no network connection,
just what was there in base install (with C compiler, of course). I
might try one day, but it seems Gauche has less dependency on outside
packages than R*.

See, while I appreciate Racket a lot there is no actual case where I
myself would want to rely on it (also, Lush). Like, I write a program
and hope it will keep working for the next few years without much work
(other than bug fixing). Thus, language stability is important to
me. Or backwards compatibility. Or at least knowing I can switch to
alternative implementation, should I ever feel such necessity.

As far as I can see it, Racket contributes to fragmentation of Scheme
scene (which is already a "everybody tends for oneself" kind,
AFAICT). There is no clear message if there is way to run in R* a code
developed with other Schemes or vice versa and a very minimalistic
effort to portability in a form of slib library is not going to work
in R*, am I right?

Common Lispers have a dated language (and boy sometimes it shows) but
at least they work together (or make good impression). And look at
their planet (mentioned above). I would be happy to write my utils in
CLISP - nice, small, conforming CL, but there is a small complication
in form of requiring certain library in just exact version matching
the exact version of CLISP and this certainly can be mitigated but I
have not so much time to tinker with other people's code. And another
"small problem" was that last time I tried writing such system util in
CL, certain file names were "transparent" for CL (because they looked
like regular expression) and I could not find way to open them (hint
from the web did not work, time ran out). So I will tinker with Scheme
and see how I fare. Yes it is time 

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Hendrik Boom]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 06:18:30AM +0100, Jesse Alama wrote:
> 
> I've had some moderate success in established, non-Racket companies by
> working around -- rather than taking on and trying to replace -- the main
> language & toolchain. For the PHP shop where I work, I made a DSL called
> Riposte [1] for testing HTTP APIs. It has become, in time, the de facto tool
> for such things. Thanks to Riposte, all developers have Racket installed on
> their workstations, even though I'm the only one who knows Racket and can
> fix problems with the tool.

Not for Racket, but for Scheme:  Gambit makes a great scripting 
language for C and C++.

At a Lisp-related conference a few years at, there was a paper 
describing a  200,000-line C/C++ program that got Gambit grafted 
on.  Subsequent development found it often better to add 
functionality to the Gambit scripts than to rewrite existing 
C/C++ code.  Within a few years the entire system was vastly 
smaller, and faster as well.

An example of gradualism.  Perhaps the application was ideally suited to 
it, perhaps not.  I don't know.

-- hendrik

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Thomas F. Burdick]

On December 27, 2018 10:47:24 PM GMT+01:00, Stephen De Gabrielle 
 wrote:
>I always wanted to ask if the prototype object model is a good idea or
>bad idea?

The most fun I ever had making GUIs was in Garnet, a library for CMU CL which 
combined prototype objects and a system where slots we're computed from 
formulas (a forerunner to FRP). The combination was just fantastic, productive, 
and made the code very easy to follow.

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Jesse Alama]

On 27 Dec 2018, at 0:04, Neil Van Dyke wrote:


Jason Stewart wrote on 12/26/18 5:25 PM:
Even for blue-sky projects without any legacy lock-in, I don't fancy 
our chances with the enterprise/MIS crowd.  They tend to favor 
straight-jacket languages, and for good reason!


Agreed.  (A big-corporate exception being R and "startup-like" 
units, not necessarily under MIS, like some might have in, e.g., 
fintech.)


For some guy running a two-man startup, something like Racket is a 
super weapon.  For a large organization--with any staff turnaround 
at all--metaprogramming is cancer.  They need a "paper trail" for 
the next guy to follow.


Them's fightin' words. :)  For a counterexample, consider a 
programmer inheriting a project with an LALR or LR(1) parser written 
voluminously by hand, and a programmer inheriting a project instead 
using a parser generator DSL.  The non-DSL-using code might never be 
understood enough to find the bugs or extend it correctly.  The new 
programmer might not even recognize the model that the non-DSL-using 
one is supposed to be implementing, nor stick to a documented model in 
what changes they do.  And then a third programmer comes along, and 
then a fourth...


In an organization with good software engineering, judicious use of 
DSLs, and having them well-documented, tested, and maintainable, seems 
a win.


I think bigger barriers to enterprise adoption of Racket than "I heard 
that 'metaprogramming' eats your babies" are:

(1) Wanting employees to be interchangeable cheap commodities.
(2) Wanting someone to blame/sue/consult if anything goes wrong.

I'm happy to let "the enterprise" wait to adopt Racket until after 
everyone else has had years of success stories.


I think we agree that startups are a much more likely path for Racket 
commercial uptake.


I've had some moderate success in established, non-Racket companies by 
working around -- rather than taking on and trying to replace -- the 
main language & toolchain. For the PHP shop where I work, I made a DSL 
called Riposte [1] for testing HTTP APIs. It has become, in time, the de 
facto tool for such things. Thanks to Riposte, all developers have 
Racket installed on their workstations, even though I'm the only one who 
knows Racket and can fix problems with the tool.


I made a tool (1) whose benefits to my boss and teammates are obvious, 
(2) which is clearly  hard to do in the main language, but (3) which 
would not kill the main line of development if I were to go away. A boss 
who respects his employee's skills and their need to "do his own thing" 
while still helping the company may indeed welcome Racket, in limited 
ways, on these grounds.


I might advocate for just making great tools/languages privately, then 
trying to make the argument for them later. The opposite is trying to 
get permission up-front to do something in Racket. That's less likely to 
succeed, I think, than just making something great and explaining its 
benefits, over time, at opportune moments. In my case, that meant 
talking with co-workers about their work and asking: "How can we model 
the proposed change in the API and be sure that we've really succeeded?" 
The implied answer being: "Write a Riposte script." That's the moment 
where it becomes clear that what I made has real benefits. I don't even 
"push" Racket. I just introduce the DSL and show them how it helps them.


Jesse

[1]: https://riposte.in

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/27/18 4:47 PM:

I always wanted to ask if the prototype object model is a good idea or bad idea?


I think it's not a bad idea, but I think you probably wouldn't use it 
for general-purpose OOA, OOD, or OOP right now.  For a long time, OO 
overwhelmingly embraced mostly the same class-instance-inheritance 
model.  Recently, we're seeing some newly popular languages back off 
from that very familiar model, including dusting off some ideas like 
traits/interfaces and mixins/composition.


I currently suspect that prototype models might be most useful for 
*not-very-programmer-ish end user* HCI models, when you don't want to 
deal in conventional types, or you can't.  My most recent example, the 
last few weeks, is finding a usable end-user semi-natural language DSL 
for nutrition tracking.  Consider that you want to very rapidly capture 
information about what you cook and eat.  You have concepts of 
ingredients and quantities.  You might also have concepts like how you 
usually make your coffee, or a few sandwiches and soups you often make 
the same.  You also have dishes that you make less-often or are 
one-offs.  You have leftovers, and the leftovers can evolve.  And you 
always want your nutritional intake tracked.  It's looking like the 
conceptual model backing a quick semi-natural language for this might 
indeed be a prototype object model, in which there's a lot of 
like-that-but-different-and-distinct.


Maybe (just speculating, off the cuff) it turns out there's also a place 
for prototype object models in symbolic machine learning, in acquiring 
some variation on frame-based representations of knowledge.


Obligatory Racket: You can make your own prototype object model in 
Racket pretty easily, a number of ways.  You can do some ways in an 
hour, or spend a day on linguistic tweaking, or spend a week or more 
making it faster or working through some ideas you thought of while you 
were working through it.



The same question applies to Morphic User Interface Construction Environment - 
good idea or bad idea?


I haven't had a chance to play with the latest work in this space, and 
maybe someone else here can talk about how the latest work conceptualizes.


It might be a coherent basket of things that you already see many 
places, and will increasingly see even more (direct manipulation user 
interfaces, composing/decomposing systems as interacting concurrent 
objects and aggregations/assemblies, maybe adapt to augmented reality 
interfaces for ubiquitous programmable things/materials in real space, 
etc.).


Also, who knows what happens, if large numbers of kids can build with 
this and other complex models during early developmental years?  Maybe 
we start seeing new HCI that takes advantage of a facility with those 
models.  Or we see new perspectives/understandings, due to the popularly 
expanded mental machinery.  (They'll need the new powers, to deal with 
everything the last 20 years of CS did through dotcoms.)


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Hendrik Boom]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 02:06:22PM -0800, Andrew Gwozdziewycz wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 8:24 AM Brett Gilio  wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hendrik Boom writes:
> >
> > > On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension
> > >> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another)
> > >> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got
> > >> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun
> > >> for earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited
> > >> HTML) while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially
> > >> by Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl
> > >> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)
> > >
> > > I seem to remember hearing that Scheme was one of the
> > > inspirations for Python.  That and another language.
> > >
> > > -- hendrik
> >
> > That other language is Dylan, which is also inspired by Scheme.
> 
> Sometime in the 2000s, I heard Guido talk at Google NYC about the
> history of Python. In the 80s he was working for / with librarians who
> used a language called "ABC."

Is that the ABC pioneered by Lambert Meertens?  I was familiar 
with it in its early days.  It was meant to be a better language 
for beginners than BASIC.

> Python was meant to be a better version
> of that. The History of Python wiki page suggests it was meant as a
> "better verson of ABC with exceptions and better integration with the
> Amoeba Operating System."[1] The exceptions originally were inspired
> by Modula-3, apparently.

Yeah.  That was the other language I couldn't think of.  One 
of my favorites for a long time, and implementations still 
available online.  An elegant language, except for its Pascal 
syntax.  

-- hendrik

> Any influence of Lisp, and Scheme came later,
> is my guess. That same page cites a quote from Guido suggesting "some
> Lisp hacker" implemented map, filter, and lambda for version 1.
> 
> 
> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.apgwoz.com

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Andrew Gwozdziewycz]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 8:24 AM Brett Gilio  wrote:
>
>
> Hendrik Boom writes:
>
> > On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> >>
> >> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension
> >> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another)
> >> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got
> >> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun
> >> for earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited
> >> HTML) while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially
> >> by Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl
> >> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)
> >
> > I seem to remember hearing that Scheme was one of the
> > inspirations for Python.  That and another language.
> >
> > -- hendrik
>
> That other language is Dylan, which is also inspired by Scheme.

Sometime in the 2000s, I heard Guido talk at Google NYC about the
history of Python. In the 80s he was working for / with librarians who
used a language called "ABC." Python was meant to be a better version
of that. The History of Python wiki page suggests it was meant as a
"better verson of ABC with exceptions and better integration with the
Amoeba Operating System."[1] The exceptions originally were inspired
by Modula-3, apparently. Any influence of Lisp, and Scheme came later,
is my guess. That same page cites a quote from Guido suggesting "some
Lisp hacker" implemented map, filter, and lambda for version 1.


[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python


-- 
http://www.apgwoz.com

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Stephen De Gabrielle]

I always wanted to ask if the prototype object model is a good idea or bad idea?

The same question applies to Morphic User Interface Construction Environment - 
good idea or bad idea?

Given neither idea seems to have caught on I’m assuming both are dead ends?

Kind regards,

Stephen


> On 27 Dec 2018, at 18:46, Neil Van Dyke  wrote:
> 
> Matthew Butterick wrote on 12/27/18 12:00 PM:
>> According to Brendan Eich, "The good parts of [JavaScript] go back to Scheme 
>> and Self" [1] combined with "a lot of stupid". [2]
> 
> I appreciate Eich's candor and thoughtfulness there.
> 
> From Self, I think JavaScript initially got the prototype object model, and 
> possibly whatever slot access/dispatch optimizations Self used.
> 
> Self did some even more novel/noteworthy things, which PL enthusiasts would 
> want to know about: JIT or runtime incremental optimization, visual/concrete 
> programming active morphs worlds, and (I include this) the morphs world 
> object editors.
> 
> Self was very neat and exotic at the time I used it.  And the set of 
> innovations suggests such a pleasing causal chain of necessity being the 
> mother of invention, that I don't want to know if it's not the truth:  morphs 
> world => loose prototype-delegation concurrent objects => runtime 
> optimization.
> 
> Regarding Scheme, I suppose Eich might've just used a simple Scheme with a 
> prototype object model (it's very simple to implement).  But Java was already 
> out there, the original purpose of LS/JS (IIRC) was merely glue to load Java 
> applets (not full-GUI-application DOM manipulation and logic like today), and 
> Sun had made Java have a C++/C syntax, because that's the kind of programmer 
> they thought would be developing in it.  I suppose, as soon as I was whipping 
> up a "Java-ish light scripting language" back then, even if Scheme was my 
> inspiration, as soon as I was figuring out the different syntax anyway, I 
> probably would've simplified semantics (e.g., free tail calls and first-class 
> continuations would seem unnecessary).
> 
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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Matthew Butterick wrote on 12/27/18 12:00 PM:
According to Brendan Eich, "The good parts of [JavaScript] go back to 
Scheme and Self" [1] combined with "a lot of stupid". [2]


I appreciate Eich's candor and thoughtfulness there.

From Self, I think JavaScript initially got the prototype object model, 
and possibly whatever slot access/dispatch optimizations Self used.


Self did some even more novel/noteworthy things, which PL enthusiasts 
would want to know about: JIT or runtime incremental optimization, 
visual/concrete programming active morphs worlds, and (I include this) 
the morphs world object editors.


Self was very neat and exotic at the time I used it.  And the set of 
innovations suggests such a pleasing causal chain of necessity being the 
mother of invention, that I don't want to know if it's not the truth:  
morphs world => loose prototype-delegation concurrent objects => runtime 
optimization.


Regarding Scheme, I suppose Eich might've just used a simple Scheme with 
a prototype object model (it's very simple to implement).  But Java was 
already out there, the original purpose of LS/JS (IIRC) was merely glue 
to load Java applets (not full-GUI-application DOM manipulation and 
logic like today), and Sun had made Java have a C++/C syntax, because 
that's the kind of programmer they thought would be developing in it.  I 
suppose, as soon as I was whipping up a "Java-ish light scripting 
language" back then, even if Scheme was my inspiration, as soon as I was 
figuring out the different syntax anyway, I probably would've simplified 
semantics (e.g., free tail calls and first-class continuations would 
seem unnecessary).


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Matthew Butterick]

According to Brendan Eich, "The good parts of [JavaScript] go back to Scheme 
and Self" [1] combined with "a lot of stupid". [2]

[1] 
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1089
 


[2] 
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1020


> On Dec 27, 2018, at 8:24 AM, Brett Gilio  wrote:
> 
> 
> Hendrik Boom writes:
> 
>> On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> I seem to remember hearing that Scheme was one of the 
>> inspirations for Python.  That and another language.
>> 
>> -- hendrik
> 
> That other language is Dylan, which is also inspired by Scheme.



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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Brett Gilio]

Hendrik Boom writes:

> On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
>> 
>> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension
>> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another)
>> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got
>> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun
>> for earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited
>> HTML) while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially
>> by Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl
>> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)
>
> I seem to remember hearing that Scheme was one of the 
> inspirations for Python.  That and another language.
>
> -- hendrik

That other language is Dylan, which is also inspired by Scheme.

Brett Gilio

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Hendrik Boom]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 09:51:17AM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> 
> Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension
> language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another)
> -- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got
> popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun
> for earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited
> HTML) while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially
> by Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl
> disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)

I seem to remember hearing that Scheme was one of the 
inspirations for Python.  That and another language.

-- hendrik

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Jason Stewart wrote on 12/26/18 5:25 PM:
Even for blue-sky projects without any legacy lock-in, I don't fancy 
our chances with the enterprise/MIS crowd.  They tend to favor 
straight-jacket languages, and for good reason!


Agreed.  (A big-corporate exception being R and "startup-like" units, 
not necessarily under MIS, like some might have in, e.g., fintech.)


For some guy running a two-man startup, something like Racket is a 
super weapon.  For a large organization--with any staff turnaround at 
all--metaprogramming is cancer.  They need a "paper trail" for the 
next guy to follow.


Them's fightin' words. :)  For a counterexample, consider a programmer 
inheriting a project with an LALR or LR(1) parser written voluminously 
by hand, and a programmer inheriting a project instead using a parser 
generator DSL.  The non-DSL-using code might never be understood enough 
to find the bugs or extend it correctly.  The new programmer might not 
even recognize the model that the non-DSL-using one is supposed to be 
implementing, nor stick to a documented model in what changes they do.  
And then a third programmer comes along, and then a fourth...


In an organization with good software engineering, judicious use of 
DSLs, and having them well-documented, tested, and maintainable, seems a 
win.


I think bigger barriers to enterprise adoption of Racket than "I heard 
that 'metaprogramming' eats your babies" are:

(1) Wanting employees to be interchangeable cheap commodities.
(2) Wanting someone to blame/sue/consult if anything goes wrong.

I'm happy to let "the enterprise" wait to adopt Racket until after 
everyone else has had years of success stories.


I think we agree that startups are a much more likely path for Racket 
commercial uptake.


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Jason Stewart]

Even for blue-sky projects without any legacy lock-in, I don't fancy our 
chances with the enterprise/MIS crowd.  They tend to favor straight-jacket 
languages, and for good reason!

For some guy running a two-man startup, something like Racket is a super 
weapon.  For a large organization--with any staff turnaround at 
all--metaprogramming is cancer.  They need a "paper trail" for the next guy 
to follow.


On Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 3:51:03 PM UTC-6, spdegabrielle wrote:
>
> Hi Matthew, Neil,
>
> > the people who are persuadable.
> So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them if not on hn? 
>
> I’m one of the ‘corporate MIS programmers’, but in the public 
> sector(health), and I get to interact with a variety of software vendors as 
> well as and build forms, worklists, reports and business logic on their 
> platforms. I certainly don’t get to choose.
>
> My role does put me in the lucky position to ask ISV’s what languages 
> their systems are written in;
> Example include (from older to newer)
> * COBOL 
> * VB.6 (two vendors)
> * ASP.net, C# & JavaScript (more recent vendor)
> * PHP w/Symfony & Python
> * Ruby on Rails 
> * Java
> * Perl 
> * Cache/MUMPS (two vendors - one is actually the customer of the other)
> [ these are all ‘single product vendors’ - I don’t know if that is unusual 
> in industry ]
>
> In all the cases it seems the language is determined by the founder, and 
> has not changed for the life of the product & company, in some cases for 
> many years (the cobol and VB products have been around for 20+ years)
>
> I’ve even met some of the founders - 3 out of 4 are specialty doctors.
>
> I will have to ask next time I meet a founder, but at this stage I don’t 
> think any ‘choosing a language’ was involved - I think the founders I have 
> met just chose whatever was available at the time. (if you a meet a 
> potential founder please say ‘have you looked at Racket?’)
>
> I had to type this to put it together in my head - maybe I shouldn’t have 
> sent it and bored you with my thought processes.
>
> So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them? 
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Stephen
>
> PS in my workplace the biggest competitor isn’t other languages, it is the 
> spreadsheet; sometimes stand alone, sometimes linked or shared, but mostly 
> with no VBA.
>
> PPS I think the Jupyter enhanced REPL idea is worth pursuing and extending 
> as this might be a way generate interest in the Racket runtime and 
> associated languages.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 26 Dec 2018 at 18:50, Matthew Butterick  > wrote:
>
>> I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think it 
>> would be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted to 
>> these stories that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside & outside 
>> academia). This could be done in an interview-style format, like Jesse 
>> Alama's recent book about language-making in Racket [1]. Photos also. I 
>> would be happy to contribute design & layout if a sufficiently motivated 
>> collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted to conduct the interviews & gather the 
>> material.
>>
>> I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack 
>> Overflow, or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon. But 
>> rather because it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of the people 
>> who are persuadable.
>>
>> [1] https://languagemakers.net/anthropology/
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 26, 2018, at 6:51 AM, Neil Van Dyke > > wrote:
>>
>> I want to see more people making a living working with/on Racket (outside 
>> of professorships, and grad student slave stipends), and I think that means 
>> a lot more companies using it for substantial projects, and I suspect the 
>> best bet is startups who can choose their tools (and are funded as 
>> gambles), and I suspect the best bet for that is getting HN startup success 
>> stories like: "we got to launch and ___ funding round, with Racket, because 
>> DSLs, and Racket is the best for that".  Then other HN people will see a 
>> success story, a couple might be inspired to think about DSLs for their own 
>> startup idea, and then somehow this becomes RACKET EXPONENTIAL EXPLOSION.  
>> Or at least more people making a living working with/on Racket.
>>
>>
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>

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Stephen, thanks for the useful info on adoption in health sector MIS.

Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 4:50 PM:
PPS I think the Jupyter enhanced REPL idea is worth pursuing and 
extending as this might be a way generate interest in the Racket 
runtime and associated languages.


BTW, to be clear (since it took me a while to unravel the vague and 
changing meanings of Jupyter and IPython the other day)...


What I proposed in another thread here was adding an user interface to 
DrRacket that's inspired by Jupyter Notebook and other notebook 
metaphors from stats tools.


There's also a different possible Jupyter angle for Racket, in which 
Racket is a backend for the Jupyter frontends (in lieu of DrRacket).  I 
think that approach would also be useful for some people, and Ryan 
Culpepper is already tackling that one (and I wanted to let him 
publicize it on his schedule).


These two different approaches might interoperate, if the first approach 
also saves a Jupyter ".ipynb" file, and then notebooks files could be 
moved back and forth between DrRacket and Jupyter, and run in both.


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Stephen De Gabrielle]

Hi Matthew, Neil,

> the people who are persuadable.
So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them if not on hn?

I’m one of the ‘corporate MIS programmers’, but in the public
sector(health), and I get to interact with a variety of software vendors as
well as and build forms, worklists, reports and business logic on their
platforms. I certainly don’t get to choose.

My role does put me in the lucky position to ask ISV’s what languages their
systems are written in;
Example include (from older to newer)
* COBOL
* VB.6 (two vendors)
* ASP.net, C# & JavaScript (more recent vendor)
* PHP w/Symfony & Python
* Ruby on Rails
* Java
* Perl
* Cache/MUMPS (two vendors - one is actually the customer of the other)
[ these are all ‘single product vendors’ - I don’t know if that is unusual
in industry ]

In all the cases it seems the language is determined by the founder, and
has not changed for the life of the product & company, in some cases for
many years (the cobol and VB products have been around for 20+ years)

I’ve even met some of the founders - 3 out of 4 are specialty doctors.

I will have to ask next time I meet a founder, but at this stage I don’t
think any ‘choosing a language’ was involved - I think the founders I have
met just chose whatever was available at the time. (if you a meet a
potential founder please say ‘have you looked at Racket?’)

I had to type this to put it together in my head - maybe I shouldn’t have
sent it and bored you with my thought processes.

So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them?

Kind regards,

Stephen

PS in my workplace the biggest competitor isn’t other languages, it is the
spreadsheet; sometimes stand alone, sometimes linked or shared, but mostly
with no VBA.

PPS I think the Jupyter enhanced REPL idea is worth pursuing and extending
as this might be a way generate interest in the Racket runtime and
associated languages.




On Wed, 26 Dec 2018 at 18:50, Matthew Butterick  wrote:

> I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think it
> would be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted to
> these stories that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside & outside
> academia). This could be done in an interview-style format, like Jesse
> Alama's recent book about language-making in Racket [1]. Photos also. I
> would be happy to contribute design & layout if a sufficiently motivated
> collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted to conduct the interviews & gather the
> material.
>
> I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack
> Overflow, or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon. But
> rather because it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of the people
> who are persuadable.
>
> [1] https://languagemakers.net/anthropology/
>
>
>
> On Dec 26, 2018, at 6:51 AM, Neil Van Dyke  wrote:
>
> I want to see more people making a living working with/on Racket (outside
> of professorships, and grad student slave stipends), and I think that means
> a lot more companies using it for substantial projects, and I suspect the
> best bet is startups who can choose their tools (and are funded as
> gambles), and I suspect the best bet for that is getting HN startup success
> stories like: "we got to launch and ___ funding round, with Racket, because
> DSLs, and Racket is the best for that".  Then other HN people will see a
> success story, a couple might be inspired to think about DSLs for their own
> startup idea, and then somehow this becomes RACKET EXPONENTIAL EXPLOSION.
> Or at least more people making a living working with/on Racket.
>
>
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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Matthew Butterick wrote on 12/26/18 1:50 PM:
I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think 
it would be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted 
to these stories that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside & 
outside academia). This could be done in an interview-style format, 
like Jesse Alama's recent book about language-making in Racket [1]. 
Photos also.


These success stories on the Racket Web site sound like a good idea.

Or, even short testimonials, or even movie poster blurb one-liners, on 
the Racket Web site, could also be good.


If one did these success stories on the Racket Web site, you could 
promote them with post(s) to Hacker News and somewhere on Reddit (not 
"/r/racket", unless you can get it cross-posted to where startup-types 
are, or somehow to the default front page).


One caution: careful not to damn oneself with faint praise.  The 
interviewer/editor would need to find noteworthy and reasonably 
current/big stories.  It's pretty common (and I've done it myself) in 
promotion of things with low adoption thus far to milk a few uses way 
too much, and way past their freshness date.


I would be happy to contribute design & layout if a sufficiently 
motivated collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted to conduct the interviews 
& gather the material.


I'm maxed out on pro bono actual-work right now.  ('My TED talk' 
explains my role now: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q=4s;)


If no Racketeer with journalistic inclinations can make these success 
story writeups happen, maybe one of the university Communications 
offices wants to do a piece on some of the Racket research and the "open 
science" aspects of it, including getting "technology transfer" quotes 
from commercial users.  And the Racket Web site could reproduce the 
article, with permission.  And then promote that URL on HN and wherever, 
and followup with the grassroots evangelizing.  (NEU PR people, for 
example, have this and some Racket-related prestigious awards and 
spreading international academic influence to brag about.)


I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack 
Overflow, or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon. 
But rather because it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of 
the people who are persuadable.


You could be right.  I was only thinking of how to reach people who'll 
do startups, with low-investment grassroots effort that every Racketeer 
could do.


(Reaching academics through research publications and prior Scheme/Lisp 
awareness, and undergrads through HtDP, for about two decades now, has 
not been converting to significant numbers of startups and other 
companies that use Racket.  I'm having flashbacks to earlier in Racket 
history, when I was surprised that every MIT Course VI (CS & EE) ugrad 
alum I encountered, despite having been taught Scheme in their 
CS-formative years, thought Scheme was only a pedagogic language for 
SICP problem sets.  It's like Scheme made an unholy bargain, to let it 
produce top intro CS textbooks, and we're foolishly fighting against the 
curse side of that. :)


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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Matthew Butterick]

I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think it would 
be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted to these stories 
that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside & outside academia). This could 
be done in an interview-style format, like Jesse Alama's recent book about 
language-making in Racket [1]. Photos also. I would be happy to contribute 
design & layout if a sufficiently motivated collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted 
to conduct the interviews & gather the material.

I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack Overflow, 
or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon. But rather because 
it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of the people who are 
persuadable.

[1] https://languagemakers.net/anthropology/


> On Dec 26, 2018, at 6:51 AM, Neil Van Dyke  wrote:
> 
> I want to see more people making a living working with/on Racket (outside of 
> professorships, and grad student slave stipends), and I think that means a 
> lot more companies using it for substantial projects, and I suspect the best 
> bet is startups who can choose their tools (and are funded as gambles), and I 
> suspect the best bet for that is getting HN startup success stories like: "we 
> got to launch and ___ funding round, with Racket, because DSLs, and Racket is 
> the best for that".  Then other HN people will see a success story, a couple 
> might be inspired to think about DSLs for their own startup idea, and then 
> somehow this becomes RACKET EXPONENTIAL EXPLOSION.  Or at least more people 
> making a living working with/on Racket.

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Neil Van Dyke]

Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/26/18 7:40 AM:
How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, Perl, 
Python, PHP, C++, Rust ?


All of those had merits, were right place and at right time, and (except 
Rust) really spread when there was *a lot* less noise and sheer mass of 
stuff.  Also, some of those had very long ramps to their ultimate 
popularity (which could give some hope to Racketeers).


Ruby with Rails was a decent language that pushed a good model and 
automagical conveniences for Web developer productivity, and they seemed 
to have a good community (e.g., when I was shopping around for my new 
research platform language, and I don't think I'd even heard of Ruby at 
that time, one of the nice Ruby people happened to hear about my quest, 
and emailed me, suggesting Ruby).


We talked about Perl growth spikes here recently.

Python started out as some guy on Usenet with a reusable extension 
language (Tcl was another, and some RnRS implementations were another) 
-- all 3 of them had interesting innovations and merits. (Tcl got 
popular because of Tk GUIs, and then it has some moments in the sun for 
earlier database-backed Web servers (as opposed to manually-edited HTML) 
while a lot more readable than Perl, and was pushed commercially by 
Philip Greenspun, before Sun hired Tcl creator Ousterhout, and Tcl 
disappeared, in favor of Java and then LiveScript/JS.)


PHP was in the early Web gold rush, when template-ish approaches were 
attractive alternative to CGI scripts that started as Perl (or, less 
likely, other imperative language) code that spat out HTML strings.  You 
could also do HTML templates various other ways, including in Perl, but 
the Web was so new, and the tools so not figured out, and everyone was 
racing to do neat stuff (or to get VC funding, then Herman Miller office 
furniture and launch party, and then IPO), that there was a lot of 
random going on, and we aren't in that kind of environment anymore.  
Well, unless you were pitching a "blockchain" startup during the BTC:USD 
run-up a year ago -- it didn't much matter what tools you grabbed, so 
long as you told the VCs you were doing "blockchain" (you didn't even 
have to madlibs pitch "Our startup is like _Uber_, for _cats_!  (Can you 
handle the sheer force of our raw innovation, unleashed!)").


C++ had the funding and promotional/endorsement backing of the people 
who brought us C and Unix, and (again) there was a lot less stuff, and a 
lot fewer programmers.  The people using C were some of the most 
technically-skilled programmers: OS-level systems programmers (who also 
used assembler), Unix workstation technical application/research 
programmers, PC shrinkwrap software developers, and EEs doing software 
bits of embedded systems.  (The corporate MIS programmers were a 
separate group -- they mostly did database forms and reports and 
business logic, and there seemed to be subgroups for different 
platforms.  Much of the MIS seemed to be analogous to today's Web 
programmers, and I'm not sure how MIS platform adoption decisions were 
made in various kinds of organizations then.)


Anyway, besides the Bell Labs / AT backing, I recall one thing that 
helped push C++ was the people doing GUI and hearing about OO (with 
references to Smalltalk), at a time when people were just reasoning 
low-level code and ad hoc formalisms, or using pre-OO analysis and 
design methods (structured SA and SD, ERDs, etc.), and it was really 
easy to sell generalization/polymorphism to those people.  Plus AT was 
saying C++ would help with mission-critical and performance-critical 
large and complex systems, and you had workstation developers like 
Mentor Graphics endorsing it.  Also, again, the amount of stuff and the 
number of programmers was a lot smaller then; one anecdote: by the time 
there was a Usenix C++ conference, it was small enough that, while 
Stroustrup was talking during a Q in the hotel conference room (maybe 
around the scale of current RacketCon), some toddler goes running up the 
aisle from the back of the room, saying something like "daddy!", and 
everyone laughs.


Early Rust had some really thoughtful and language careful design, and 
it tackled one of the hardest challenges of working in C, which is 
allocation management (which not enough C programmers take seriously 
enough).  Now they have the funding investment and high-profile 
endorsement (sound familiar?) of Mozilla and a few other 
credibility-lending companies, and might be driven now in part by 
pragmatic needs of projects.  (Early Racket pragmatics also seemed 
driven by pragmatic needs, like getting DrScheme to work, and 
cross-platform.)  Rust has also attracted a ton of volunteer effort, 
including a large number of high-quality and innovative reusable 
packages.  (Innovative, not unlike you'd see from Lisp-family people, 
because their platform gives them an advantage, and because the 
programmer is likely to be high-skilled.  Racket 

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Stephen De Gabrielle]

Maybe a high profile social media patron - I’m sure JA is doing wonders for
TiddlyWiki:
https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1077842077705293824?s=21

How did other languages grow their audience? e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, Perl,
Python, PHP, C++, Rust ?
(All fine languages with  many strengths - but there are many fine
languages with the same strengths that are not objectively worse. Some may
be better e.g. Haskell, ML family, Lisp family, prolog family)

happy Boxing Day
Stephen

On Thu, 13 Dec 2018 at 23:53, Neil Van Dyke  wrote:

> This might be a bad idea, and normally I disapprove of this sort of
> thing, but... does anyone want to take on the job of RACKET EVANGELISM
> STRIKE FORCE, among a concentration of startup-types and other software
> practitioners?
>
> Specifically, you'd participate regularly in Y Combinator's popular
> "Hacker News" Web forum, "https://news.ycombinator.com/;, and, when the
> not-unusual occasion to mention/show a strength of Racket presents
> itself, do so.
>
> I occasionally see Racket mentioned on HN, but not nearly as often as it
> legitimately could be.
>
> (There are also other strategic targets for the RACKET EVANGELISM STRIKE
> FORCE operator or cell, and I recall Eli Barzilay and others active on a
> lot of them years ago, but HN might be first priority right now.)
>
> --
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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 06:11:09AM -0800, Jérôme Martin wrote:
> I'm also occasionally writing posts about Racket on my blog. Only one is 
> public for now, and is a multi-parts tutorial about writing DSLs in Racket.
> 
> I'm trying to summarize and reformulate some of the things I learned by 
> making small languages in Racket. If you already read Beautiful Racket, I 
> guess there's nothing new to learn, because I'm mostly targeting developers 
> not aware of lisp languages.
> 
> You can find the first part here: 
> http://rilouw.eu/article/the-programming-language-of-your-dreams-part-1
> Feel free to contact me if you want to share some advice and feedback!

Definitely not ready yet.  You've written a start to an exposition on 
how write a #lang module,  and actually showed how to do it in an 
incremental way, testing and checking what you do while you do it.  An
exposition I'd very much like to read the rest of.  I too have racket 
tweaks I'd like to implement.

(1) You start out with an imaginary UI language (which hapens to look 
like XML; I noticed that!) and you seem to indicate that you're going 
to show how Racket can choke that down.

(2) But all you do is show how you can, via your (incomplete) 
ui-lang.rkt module, get Racket to behave like Racket.  This isn't 
likely to impress.

Since I already know about Racket and appreciate it, I can appreciate 
what you've accomplished, and how this is a reasonable base for further 
development.  But the non-Racket-initiate isn't going to get that.  And 
he's likely not to get around to episode #2 of your exposition.

(3) In the end, you present a different language from the one at the 
beginning -- something that's not XML. It might have been better not 
even to mention the XML version at the start, but instead mention the 
one you are actually going to implement.  XML, for the reader you are 
targetting, is old-hat anyway.

I'm not at all sure how to rewrite this in a style that is likely to 
grab and maintain the interest of the reader you are aiming for.

Writing is *hard*.

Maybe you need to use the textual freedom the web gives you and, early 
on, have links to the actual implementation details.  Or mention the 
translation of this special-purpose language is.  Or how it's executed.  
Or what the menus look like (a screen-shot, maybe?)

Anywaay, I'd like to see the rest of what you're doing.  Perhaps just 
email me the actual implementation code so I can look it over before 
you rewrite your short series of article.

I'll be happy to provide prepublication critique of what you write -- 
what works for me, what doesn't work, and what I do and don't think 
will work for the intended audience.

-- hendrik

> 
> I'm not confident the article is worth a post on HN for now, and I don't 
> know if my Racket server will sustain a mention on HN anyway, but if you 
> feel it's worth posting, feel free to do so.
> 
> On Monday, December 17, 2018 at 2:30:55 AM UTC+1, Alex Harsanyi wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sunday, December 16, 2018 at 12:48:09 AM UTC+8, Peter Schmiedeskamp 
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I 
> >> wonder if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to 
> >> interesting 
> >> HackerNews queries. 
> >>
> >> For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for 
> >> building and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked 
> >> around with the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like 
> >> Racket has a pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller 
> >> cross-platform 
> >> apps. A short blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, 
> >> with 
> >> emphasis on showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent 
> >> raco 
> >> packaging and distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an 
> >> article on HN. 
> >
> >
> >> I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be 
> >> collected... maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a 
> >> premium, 
> >> but I could imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m 
> >> a decidedly rank novice Racketeer. 
> >>
> >> Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of 
> >> the Racket Blog? 
> >>
> >
> >
> > I have written a few blog posts on Racket GUI topics and I have a few more 
> > planned.  They cover some more advanced uses of the GUI library -- I think 
> > the basics are already well documented. You can find them here:
> >
> >https://alex-hhh.github.io/tags/racket.html
> >
> > Alex.
> >
> >
> 
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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Gustavo Massaccesi]

I agree that it would be much better to write good blog posts about Racket.
They don't need to be fantastic, they don't need to be better than the
documentation, they only has to be interesting. I usually prefer post with
one or two big relevant graph (or photos when there is hardware involve), I
like images. (It doesn't have to be very interesting, sometimes an article
is more interesting than what you expect)

Have you recently solved some interesting problem (using Racket)? It's
better if it's a real life problem, but a nice toy problem can be
interesting too.

Sometimes translating an interesting article to Racket can be a good idea,
if the translation shows some unique feature, like a smart use of macros or
a library that are not available in other languages.

(Don't post too often. Unless you are very good writing, you can't write
more than one interesting article per week(/month(/year)).)

---

The problem of going to HN to write comments about Racket is that the
community has a lot of unwritten rules. (No jokes. No kittens. No
astroturfing/sockpupet/meatpupets. No onliners. [1] . No voting rings. No
asking for votes in other platforms.)

There is no problem if an article gets popular and the author goes to the
site to answer the questions. The unwritten rules are not too strict and
they don't apply if the author can give some interesting relevant answers
and more information. *Don't be afraid of answering questions there.*

Some types of bad comments:

* photobomb unrelated threads with a reference to Racket. (For example, in
an article about regular expression in PHP, posting "Racket has two types
of regular expressions").

* astroturfing comments (For example in an article about something in
Racket, posting "I use it too and it is fantastic" [there is also an
unwritten rule about too many exclamation marks].)

* fake questions in unrelated articles (like "I wonder if it possible to
write this in Racket?")

* "Why didn't they use Racket instead?" "Why don't they rewrite this in
Racket?" ([bonus negative points if it is another Scheme-like language])

Gustavo


[1] You can write onliners in HN, but it's very difficult to write good
onliners. It's much easier to add more information and more context. Jokes
are also legal, but it must be a very good original joke, so better avoid
jokes.




On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Schmiedeskamp 
wrote:

> I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I
> wonder if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to interesting
> HackerNews queries.
>
> For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for
> building and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked
> around with the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like
> Racket has a pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller cross-platform
> apps. A short blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, with
> emphasis on showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent raco
> packaging and distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an
> article on HN.
>
> I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be
> collected... maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a premium,
> but I could imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m
> a decidedly rank novice Racketeer.
>
> Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of
> the Racket Blog?
>
> Best,
> Peter
>
> --
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On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Schmiedeskamp 
wrote:

> I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I
> wonder if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to interesting
> HackerNews queries.
>
> For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for
> building and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked
> around with the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like
> Racket has a pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller cross-platform
> apps. A short blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, with
> emphasis on showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent raco
> packaging and distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an
> article on HN.
>
> I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be
> collected... maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a premium,
> but I could imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m
> a decidedly rank novice Racketeer.
>
> Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of
> the Racket Blog?
>
> Best,
> Peter
>
> --
> You received this 

Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Jérôme Martin]

I'm also occasionally writing posts about Racket on my blog. Only one is 
public for now, and is a multi-parts tutorial about writing DSLs in Racket.

I'm trying to summarize and reformulate some of the things I learned by 
making small languages in Racket. If you already read Beautiful Racket, I 
guess there's nothing new to learn, because I'm mostly targeting developers 
not aware of lisp languages.

You can find the first part here: 
http://rilouw.eu/article/the-programming-language-of-your-dreams-part-1
Feel free to contact me if you want to share some advice and feedback!

I'm not confident the article is worth a post on HN for now, and I don't 
know if my Racket server will sustain a mention on HN anyway, but if you 
feel it's worth posting, feel free to do so.

On Monday, December 17, 2018 at 2:30:55 AM UTC+1, Alex Harsanyi wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sunday, December 16, 2018 at 12:48:09 AM UTC+8, Peter Schmiedeskamp 
> wrote:
>>
>> I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I 
>> wonder if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to interesting 
>> HackerNews queries. 
>>
>> For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for 
>> building and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked 
>> around with the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like 
>> Racket has a pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller cross-platform 
>> apps. A short blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, with 
>> emphasis on showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent raco 
>> packaging and distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an 
>> article on HN. 
>
>
>> I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be 
>> collected... maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a premium, 
>> but I could imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m 
>> a decidedly rank novice Racketeer. 
>>
>> Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of 
>> the Racket Blog? 
>>
>
>
> I have written a few blog posts on Racket GUI topics and I have a few more 
> planned.  They cover some more advanced uses of the GUI library -- I think 
> the basics are already well documented. You can find them here:
>
>https://alex-hhh.github.io/tags/racket.html
>
> Alex.
>
>

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Alex Harsanyi]

On Sunday, December 16, 2018 at 12:48:09 AM UTC+8, Peter Schmiedeskamp 
wrote:
>
> I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I 
> wonder if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to interesting 
> HackerNews queries. 
>
> For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for 
> building and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked 
> around with the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like 
> Racket has a pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller cross-platform 
> apps. A short blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, with 
> emphasis on showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent raco 
> packaging and distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an 
> article on HN. 


> I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be 
> collected... maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a premium, 
> but I could imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m 
> a decidedly rank novice Racketeer. 
>
> Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of 
> the Racket Blog? 
>


I have written a few blog posts on Racket GUI topics and I have a few more 
planned.  They cover some more advanced uses of the GUI library -- I think 
the basics are already well documented. You can find them here:

   https://alex-hhh.github.io/tags/racket.html

Alex.

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Peter Schmiedeskamp]

I’m probably guilty of already being part of this task-force. To add, I wonder 
if there’d be value in some longer, blog-form replies to interesting HackerNews 
queries.

For example, someone was extolling the virtues of some new system for building 
and packaging simple GUI apps for Linux using Python. I’ve poked around with 
the GUI and packaging facilities of Racket enough to feel like Racket has a 
pretty good story to tell, at least for smaller cross-platform apps. A short 
blog showing the end-to-end creation of a small GUI app, with emphasis on 
showing the symbiosis of the GUI library and the excellent raco packaging and 
distribution facilities would be a great “reply” to such an article on HN.

I wonder if there's a way that these use cases could at least be collected... 
maybe as an RFB—Request For Blog. Time is always at a premium, but I could 
imagine picking off a blog post here and there even though I’m a decidedly rank 
novice Racketeer.

Maybe there’s already a list somewhere? Maybe RFBs could be a section of the 
Racket Blog?

Best,
Peter

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Re: [racket-users] hackernews

[Jens Axel Søgaard]

Den fre. 14. dec. 2018 kl. 00.53 skrev Neil Van Dyke :

> This might be a bad idea, and normally I disapprove of this sort of
> thing, but... does anyone want to take on the job of RACKET EVANGELISM
> STRIKE FORCE, among a concentration of startup-types and other software
> practitioners?
>
> Specifically, you'd participate regularly in Y Combinator's popular
> "Hacker News" Web forum, "https://news.ycombinator.com/;, and, when the
> not-unusual occasion to mention/show a strength of Racket presents
> itself, do so.
>
> I occasionally see Racket mentioned on HN, but not nearly as often as it
> legitimately could be.
>

FWIW - here is my bookmark for "Has Racket been mentioned lately?"

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=racket=byDate=0=pastWeek=all

/Jens Axel

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