Making a language fast and well-documented is a thankless task. It's nothing short of a herculean accomplishment for these guys to come out of left field with such a fantastic offering.
All it needs now is 'try Racket in your browser' and a video of some dude making a blog in 15 minutes using Racket. Then it will be the new hotness.
All it needs now is 'try Racket in your browser' and a video of some dude making a blog in 15 minutes using Racket. Then it will be the new hotness.
You're using it now. Arc was built on top of PLT and news.arc ships with it. So,you are using the killer app / example that you are looking for right now.
:)
EDIT: Clarification
What good is a language if you can't make yet another twitter client in 15 minutes.
(That's a first impression. Then I read the comments here, and discovered it's based on PLT Scheme, which at least tell s me a little about what to expect.)
Others will obviously disagree with that sentiment. :)
Yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408292
Some months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221374
Impressive.
Frigging worthless university programming courses didn't bother teaching scheme.
Learning scheme's libraries on my own along with the lisp paradigm proved too daunting before (or maybe I just never found the right toy project to stick with, not really sure). Having java libraries there to back me up (I was doing stuff with hadoop too, so that made sense) gave me the little leg up I needed to get over the hump.
Clojure has a lot of handy stuff and the fact that's built on top of the JVM (with its limitations, indeed) is a major plus.
SLIB has worked in the past. If there are specific parts of SLIB you need, try asking the mailing list for help.
You sound like we should simply take the first best anything we run into and than stick with it unconditionally for the sole purpose of not having to spend time looking over the wall.
Do you at least remember the day back then when you lost your adventuresomeness?
You could have easily made the point without being snarky and insulting.
I enjoy the rational argument you give here, but I think you went too far by attacking my personality and misconstruing my words. The opposite of many is few, not one, and that was the impetus for my comment - right now "we" all seem to be focused on developing a tiny little area of programming instead of the whole and the effects are obvious if you have to work with it - towering technology stacks of crumbly code that are unstable through bad design and a lack of low-level mentality at the high-level - so bad they give Apple a pretty solid excuse to ban Flash on iPhone.
As for my "adventuresomeness" I'm comfortable with all the major paradigms and languages and work at every level, from encoded instruction bytes up to things like SQL/XSLT with C/Haskell/Fortran/Java/Ruby/Python/whatever inbetween and a wide variety of platforms (phones/games consoles/PDAs/calculators/PCs). I learned three languages in the last month - only two of which were through necessity at work and I am happy to make radical comments which express my opinions and not turn away from them when they clash with flavour of the month/year/decade... and thats just programming. I dunno what you call adventuresome but from your comment, I'd imagine its probably a lot less adventurous than me... but then I might be misconstruing words and attacking your personality then. :P
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/kh...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#Continuations_in_W...
At any rate, I'm pretty sure PLT Scheme predates both Java and the CLI, so you'd be better off slagging Microsoft for their duplication.
Second, the Racket VM supports lots of things that other VMs don't: the Racket module system [1], kill-safe synchronization [2], custodians and eventspaces [3], first-class continuations, and many other things besides.
[1] Composable and Compilable Modules, Flatt 2002
[2] Kill-Safe Synchronization Abstractions, Flatt + Findler 2004
[3] Programming Languages as Operating Systems, Flatt et al, 1999
The PLT VM is very very good, and their FFI is very flexible. If you want a lispy dialect on the Java VM, you have one. But otherwise, why does it matter?
