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Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on getting started in Scheme. It hasn't been easy. It seems like it's entirely married to Emacs, and I really, really don't want to learn Yet Another Editor. I'm finding the documentation to be very terse and unhelpful. Tutorials, guides, and documentation all drop terms casually which mean absolutely nothing to me. The key chording seems nonsensical. So far, I've spent about one hour learning Lisp, and many hours learning how to install and use the Scheme interpreter.

(I realize that it probably sounds silly to complain of learning "yet another" editor, when it's one of the two longest-lived for programming, but really, Emacs is extremely complex, and all I want to do is work through SICP)

As for the article, his description sounds like comp.lang.* .

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http://racket-lang.org/

Easy GUI IDE with debugging, etc.

It's annoying to learn another IDE< yes, but Scheme just needs an IDE that understands how to highlight/indent it properly.

Thoroughly seconded. Racket is a fantastic tool.

It's a little obtuse to learn unless you're following along a course text with it, but nowhere near emacs' learning curve.

Awesome, thanks for that! I was up and running a sample within five minutes.

If you're reading SICP you may want to look into this: http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/

It's a package to support some code in the book that is some what implementation specific, drawing graphics for the picture language, for instance.

I bless you from the bottom of my heart.

>I realize that it probably sounds silly to complain of learning "yet another" editor

Although I like Emacs and have used Emacs every day that I have not been out of town for the last 19 years, I do not think it sounds silly for a programmer to complain of learning Emacs!

You don't have to use Emacs. Use what ever editor you want. Personally, I use VIM because that's what I have been using last 20 years.

I believe when I was going to school we used DrScheme for Scheme development, and I think it was pretty straightforward. Suggest giving it a try - hope it helps you get to the fun part of learning Scheme (the code).

It appears that DrScheme was PLT Scheme, which became Racket, for any other noobs like me who are reading this.

It's now DrRacket. DrRacket is pretty much like emacs with only 1 configuration. I use it a lot

Complaining about learning a text editor is hardly foolish. Takes time, and it's annoying. However, if it's genuinely "yet another", rather than merely "another", sounds like learning emacs might help with your larger problem ;)

(My tips would be: ignore the menu bar and ignore the scroll bar, spend time figuring out how the C-h help works, and don't (yet) try to fight its tendency to crap new windows everywhere. Oh, and overall, don't expect it to be any easier to learn than vim. It is just as bizarre and alien, in its own way...)

Why aren't you using Racket?

Because I had no idea it exists. I guess I have to add discoverability to my list of gripes. :-)

Discoverability is an issue, definitely. Lisp is largely stuck in the C++ world of "multiple implementations, libraries are your problem" rather than the more modern GEM/CPAN/etc paradigm. Racket has a lot of libraries, though, and Quicklisp does the same for Common Lisp.

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