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Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

I'll always have a soft spot for Racket, because of how the IDE literally draws arrows for you, overlaid on top of the code, linking the various occurrences of a (hovered) variable together.[1][2] Seriously, how cool is that? Alas, it's unclear how to begin to implement such a feature in a performant way in a DOM-based editor like vscode (I'm not a web developer, so maybe I'm wrong about this.)

[1] Example gif: https://docs.racket-lang.org/define-attributes/examplecodear...

[2] > Lexical Structure: The lexical structure is shown with arrows overlaid on the program text. When the mouse cursor passes over a variable, DrRacket draws an arrow from the binding location to the variable, or from the binding location to every bound occurrence of the variable.

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I have also have a soft spot for Racket, although professionally I lean on Common Lisp to get stuff done.

The once a year RacketCon conference was two weekends ago, and in addition to the technical talks, I enjoyed hearing the 4 academics who are primary implementers and maintainers taking questions from the audience about why Racket is not targeted at industry. I am just finishing up writing a Racket book, that really just consists of my own little code experiments (no big deal). You can read it free online https://leanpub.com/racket-ai/read

> I enjoyed hearing the 4 academics who are primary implementers and maintainers taking questions from the audience about why Racket is not targeted at industry.

That's interesting. That seems like a flip from a few years ago. What was the summary regarding this?

My understanding of what the 4 academic devs were saying: Racket is a rich environment for language experiments, academic work, and is attracting some interest in wider commercial use. I think they hope that more 3rd parties do some of the work for supporting industrial applications. I didn’t take notes of the panel discussion, but this is how I remember the dialog.

The question came from a young member of the audience. It was phrased something like:

"Why isn't Racket used in industry like OCaml is used by Jane Street."

And what can you answer to that? Of course the Racket would like for some both commercial users as well as sponsors.

In fact [1] Racket changed its license from LGPL to Apache 2.0 or the MIT license to make sure it can be used commercially.

The fact is that language popularity isn't determined by quality of language/implementation alone. Having companies like Apple (Swift) and Google (Go) backing a language helps tremendously.

[1] https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-rel...

The major issue Racket has is the same one other functional languages have: its hard to find any developers who know those languages or are willing to work in them. There are compelling arguments for functional programming[0] and I enjoyed programming in both Racket and Chez Scheme in college but I never bothered putting it on my resume because functional programming isn't widely used.

The corporate world is mostly obsessed with OOP to the extent that every new imperative/procedural language like Go or Rust has to pretend to be OOP to get corporate adoption. Functional languages can't pretend to be OOP so they can't get past the corporate filter except at a handful of firms that use them for competitive advantage.

It also isn't easy to get the few functional programming jobs that do exist because they're often looking for developers who already have professional functional programming experience and that isn't easy to get unless you're already at a company that uses functional programming.

[0]: One of the most compelling pro-functional programming arguments is this one which argues that mutable state (being able to alter a variable's value after you set it) and variables being able to be null are harmful like GOTO statements: https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming

I don't have notes of what I said (recording will be up soon) but that isn't what I was trying to say at all. We value use in industry and have made significant effort to enable it (like relicensing everything). It is true, of course, that we're academics, and so we need to learn from others about how to better enable industrial use of Racket, but that is not because we don't care about it.

I didn't read "not targeted at industry" as equivalent to "doesn't care about industry".

Indeed. Racket maintainers do consider input from industry users and sometimes make changes based on that input, but it is not targeted at industry.

I enjoyed the panel discussion - I was not complaining.

I didn't read it as complaining but I think your impression was not what I was aiming to say.

I'm sure there is this one person who builds a webdev ecosystem in racket. sorry, can't really recall his name. I'm pretty sure he has a lot of valuable input.

Here's the relevant part of the recording: https://youtu.be/va_uBcX9bNM?si=24C1L_bs878PS6pv&t=1400

What I said was (in part) "I am sure there are ways we can improve to attract people inside of academia, outside of academia, in open source, in commercial development, and we want to improve in all of those ways".

Did not try Racket specifically, but I did quite a lot of work with Dr. Scheme 15/20 years ago, which I think is Racket's ancestor?

It would allow you to define variables which were actual images. The image was a thumbnail in the code, which you could assign and print. It was mind blowing.

Also your Lambda keywords could be replaced with an actual Lambda symbol, which was the pinnacle of coolness.

This, as well as the super snappy and responsive split REPL, made the overall development experience with Scheme feel super futuristic and just a pure enjoyment all around.

It's got myriad other issues, but Mathematica is a lot like this. You can have "rich" literals like a sound file or and image or a 3d model and see and manipulate along with the source, which has a couple of different levels of syntactic sugar, from being an ugly text-only lisp up to stuff that looks like it comes from a well-illustrated text book.

What's missing from my life is a good FOSS equivalent. There are several wonderful tools which do similar things, e.g. Jupyter, org-babel, TeXmacs, Sage, mathics. None of them feel quite right though.

I once had fantasies about starting an open source project for Common Lisp that would attempt to implement a little bit of the Wolfram data display stuff. I stopped paying for LispWorks, so I no longer have CAPI for GUIs, so that is not going to happen. Racket’s UI support would make Racket a good platform for an open source project like this. (I won’t work on it, LLMs are so much more fascinating than any other tech, and use up my free time).

I did recently pay for an entire year of Wolfram Desktop in the hope of really getting into it. I have code experiments for all the stuff I love (machine learning, deep learning, LLM, semantic web, etc.) but to be honest using the Wolfram Language does not give me the joy that I get using Common Lisp,and various Schemes, and, for some things Python is the most practical language.

HolyC is like this as well.

i bought a year sub to the “deluxe” pack of mathematica for like 300usd. it was pretty good, but one glaring weakness is lack of lazy streams. This came to my attention when i attempted problem 7ish in project euler, which asked something like “sum all the fibonacci numbers less than a million” or something. Woulda been perfectly elegantly done in Haskell using a stream and only TAKEing what I needed, but in mathematica I need an imperatice monstrosity using Do, For, While, etc. I was absolutely disgusted and didnt bother renewing.

It has changed quite a bit in 20 years

No idea how to do this in a VSCode extension, but you could place a full-screen <canvas> over the whole editor with pointer-events: none. Then, you could use offsetLeft/Top or getBoundingClientRect() on relevant text elements to figure out where to draw lines on the canvas.

I don't think you can do that in a "normal" VS Code editor window, but it is possible in a custom one (where you have to do "everything" yourself): https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/custom-ed...

(so, not much chance of adding that to my Chez extension ;)

The coolness of Lisp Machines and Interlisp-D, which is where Raket took its inspiration from.

The Racket community is just full of wholesome folks and it is contagious. Racket makes more awesomeness in the world.

Yes, there are many lovely people, but it is best not to romanticize the community as a whole -- it's got some issues, too: https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-i-no-longer-contrib...

True, that wasn't my intent and you are right to draw this out into the open.

I have had the pleasure if witness a couple Matthew Butterick talks first hand and they are excellent. He is a great speaker and thinker. I have also seen the subject the article lose his cool a couple times. Which is not cool. Esp given his prominent place in the community. At this point and think he should make himself a bystander.

I agree. In 1982 I got a Lisp Machine running InterLisp-D, and it was “batteries included” like Racket.

If you don’t mind Smalltalk, the modern Pharo ecosystem is also amazing.

Neither of those restarted their Lisp when one pressed a run button. The Lispm IDEs were always running and always in the same environment as the programs. A whole different story.

Being inspired doesn't mean 100% the same experience.

Just like Notebooks are miles away from that experience, and yet they allow millions of programmers to have an experience that wouldn't have otherwise, even with Lisp Machines/Interlisp-D providing a much better one.

I still fail to see how the Racket IDE is inspired by Lisp Machines specifically. Do you have any pointers where this is discussed?

What do you think is inspired by some Lisp Machine? REPLs existed before. Editors existed before. IDEs existed before. Lisp IDEs existed before. For example Interlisp had a Lisp IDE in the early 70s, long before it was morphed into something like a Lisp Machine with Interlisp-D.

racket is also one of the very few free lisps with a visual debugger and stepper, which is crazy when you realize how widely available that is in modern languages

Most likely because they got students to implement that for their thesis work, and free Common Lisp are seldom used for thesis stuff.

Like in many free tooling most people rather do with what they have instead of improving them, hence why all great developer experiences are either commercial or corporate sponsored.

> all great developer experiences are either commercial or corporate sponsored

GNU Emacs disagrees.

VSCode adoption in detriment of Emacs disagrees.

GP talked about "great developer experiences", not adoption. There are lots of reasons inferior tools, standards etc. may be more widely adopted.

Great development experiences drive adoption.

I know Eight Megabytes of Continuous Memory Swap since those 8MB actually mattered.

"EMoCMS"?

It's "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping".

Yeah, it's been a while.

I don’t think the arrows are possible with VScode?

Someone said they might be possible with CodeMirror https://codemirror.net/

(Just in general - not specifically for racket- I’d love to see this for rust and elixir)

> I don’t think the arrows are possible with VScode?

They are possible, but not using the "normal" editor window, you need a "custom" one: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/custom-ed...

So not completely impossible, just effectively impossible.

Why would doing it in VS Code be any more or less impossible than implementing it from scratch anywhere else?

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