Hacker News Reader

Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Why would you use Racket when it barely resembles Scheme anymore?

Also, Akkuscm exists now, so you can get free r{6,7}rs libraries for most scheme implementations from there, in a sane, pragmatic Scheme environment.

View on HN

Honest question as someone who came to Lisp via Racket seven years ago and has never touched Scheme: why is Scheme so great that any deviation from it is undesirable?

There are advantages to programming to a language specification and only writing a minimal amount of implementation-specific code. For one thing it makes the presuppositions of your program more explicit than if you’re writing in a language where the sole implementation is the specification. However, scheme has traditionally focused on a minimal standard (partly as a reaction to Common Lisp) and this has made “standard only” scheme less practical than the equivalent in Common Lisp or C/C++

> Why would you use Racket when it barely resembles Scheme anymore?

Because as well as transcending Scheme, it includes Scheme (both r5rs and r6rs are bundled.) There are also third-party r7rs implementations.

Can't you write Scheme in Racket?

https://www.monolune.com/articles/running-scheme-programs-us...

Totally, and Racket is cool because you can see it as a framework for creating languages.

But Racket is built on top of Chez Scheme so you can also use that directly if you just want a Scheme.

Never used any Scheme, so I wanted to make sure I interpret that site correctly.

It provides packages written in any Scheme, which you can use from any other Scheme (which works because they follow the same specification (R6RS/R7RS))?

That's pretty cool.

Basically, but there corner cases too, if a package uses SRFIs, not every implementation will support them properly. For the most part, it’s like you described but it’s worth running the tests on every new package you work with, in my experience.

> Why would you use Racket when it barely resembles Scheme anymore?

In fairness, they stopped calling themselves a Scheme for a reason. More innovation in the Lisp space is a good thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com