Update on my Racket exit | Hacker News Reader

Update on my Racket exit

blog.winny.tech

35 pointstodsacerdoti19 comments

Racket frustrates me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36541758 - June 2023 (127 comments)

Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal? I've been happily using Python for over a decade and never encountered weird, dramatic behavior by its creators or main developers.

Could it be that some languages, through the target audience they attract, seal their disastrous fate? By that I mean languages that attract nerds like me or peculiar math-oriented minds who can nit pick at every single detail.

You wouldn't expect this much nit from a mass-scale enterprise language like Java.

Tim Peters and GvR did both hit the news https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/09/core_python_developer... in the past couple of years!

Small languages, especially languages without an organization behind them, don't have anybody to manage the oddities of the humans creating it. Python had that one core developer that was banned by the oversight board. There was quite a bit of drama around that, but it was buried in the boring Bureaucracy of it all.

I'd be surprised if some of the Java developers wouldn't be assholes or weird, just statistically. The difference there is that you don't interact with the individual developers. Oracle handle all of that internally.

Never ever underestimate people’s need to not be bored. The meditative mind is not something that’s just handed to you.

To quote Charles Issawi:

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."

Big projects have big problems to deal with. On small projects with no such distractions, the influence of personalities is relatively larger.

This is not a creator or main developer of Racket and perhaps not even an active community member.

And Python doesn't have drama. Since when?

What "drama"? This person's original blog post[0] seems to have merely expressed general frustrations with the Racket language and ecosystem. It's not clear to me whether anything dramatic happened here.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240110183908/https://blog.winn...

[No comment on the drama angle]

I wouldn't call Racket a 'tiny niche' language--its influence is much greater. It is a direct modern descendent of Lisp-1 languages.

I used it to do SiCP and learned a lot about what a language or program can do (as I imagine many others have as well).

While talking about Racket, worth mentioning HtDP(How to Design Programs) as well.

>Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal?

What drama are you referring to? The post is a pretty breezy explanation of how he handed off some old projects.

* Racket is for great programmers who don't care about whether they have the latest JS or Python community commodity keywords on their resume. You can be ridiculously productive with it.

* Over the years, the academic priorities and investment of Racket have been its greatest strength, but also sometimes a weakness.

* Yes, getting good at Scheme or Racket and/or Common Lisp will make you a better programmer, but a less employable one. Keep it secret, not on your resume. (Though, if you write blog posts to promote your personal brand, you can do a rare post on Lisps, with a carefully-tuned level of casual curiosity, so that readers think you are a smart and savvy brogrammer, but not an actual nerd. Be sure dilute the Lisp on your blog, with some currently popular other keywords, to signal in a way recognizable to bros that you are gettin' it done, in a bro fist-bumping way, with your stacks and workflows and sprints and standups and OKRs and KPIs and RSUs.)

I have 2 questions:

- What is he using now? (Python?)

- Is there a LISP dialect that doesn't suffer from this problem? I can see that from time to time LISP projects start taking off just do die a year later and I'm stuck using Emacs (Lighttable comes into mind)

> - What is he using now? (Python?)

From the blog:

>> I’ve been writing a great deal of Python, Bash, Awk, Perl 5 for my own consumption

I saw that but it wasn't explicitly stated that's why I asked.

Incidentally these are all languages that come preinstalled out of the box on Debian. [1] So that leads me to suspect this person might be trying to develop something in extremis, with zero connection to the internet whatsoever and zero tools except what comes preinstalled on a typical Linux box.

[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/what-programming-languages...

It was developer experience that precipitated this fallout, a language usually needs to be growing in user base for the developer experience to improve as people complain and tackle problems they encounter.

The old linked thread had some prominent figure saying “but just do <inconvenient thing>” in response to every issue, if the language isn’t growing, only people accustomed to the inconveniences stick around.

So, I’d say it used to be Clojure, but now I doubt there is one.

Clojure and Common Lisp are still around and are quite active. There’s been a lot of cool stuff brewing for both languages recently

> - Is there a LISP dialect that doesn't suffer from this problem?

I am not sure what problem you are referring to. Racket has been actively developed since the mid-90s.

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