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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

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

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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".

> 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

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