Many other deployments work similarly. Make a docker container and put it anywhere. Are Racket docker containers necessarily that much bigger than lets say Python ones or GNU Guile ones?
Racket is packaged in GNU Guix btw., even, if I have had mixed experiences with the package, it should be mentioned. So someone already succeeded in packaging it in the package manager, that once was derived from Nix.
> Do I want to write 4x the code (in Racket) because I forgot my secret move was actually all the pypi packages that I took for granted in Python?
This really depends on what kind of code you are writing. When I wrote some Racket programs, I used mostly built-ins or perhaps 1 or 2 dependencies. Depending on the project, maybe one needs more of those dependencies and writing them oneself would be too much work. But for simple dependencies that are easy to write oneself, I wouldn't want to use a dependency from PyPI.
> Do I want to deal with being blocked due to not understanding how to use the less understood features of racket such as continuations, syntax-parse/syntax-case macros, units/signatures? You’ll want to know about all these things to write effective Racket code.
Hm, I don't know whether you want to. Do you want to be a capable programmer understanding more language concepts, being able to apply them perhaps in your next project or when learning your next language? Do you want to be able to express things elegantly than possible in Python for example? Do you want to know Scheme things? If not then OK, we all make our choices. I personally don't think it is good to avoid learning about something like continuations and stumble on without such knowledge as a programmer, but in more mainstream languages it probably is sufficient. However, one can also write lots of effective Racket code without going into macros. One does not have to follow the idea of having to make a language.
> But then the real hard truths started to appear. I was losing a lot of productivity. The productivity losses were incremental but certainly slowed down my velocity significantly over the last seven years. Sure the language has a lot of wonderful features, but there’s more to a good programming language than well, its programming language.
This is probably the most important point raised.
I hope though, that people who run into any shortages with Racket consider building the thing they are missing, if they are able to, to add to the ecosystem and to avoid the next person running into the same thing lacking. If no one ever writes their own, we will only ever stick with the status quo in terms of programming languages. (And fortunately people do write their own often.)