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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

While the language is interesting, sadly, nobody is using it in the wild. Maybe due to cumbersome deployment options? The ability to produce native standalone executables would boost its usage I believe.

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It is not due to deployment options. People put all sorts of stuff in docker containers every day. It is rather that few people make an effort to learn a lisp, and fewer still who choose to learn Racket. The few universities teaching good computer programming basics using Racket don't really make a dent. You simply don't have coworkers who know this stuff. Are you going to be the one person making a decision at the company, to use something no one but you knows? Not gonna happen.

I have not had a single coworker, who has even started to learn these things, even after I have presented a Scheme on a Friday afternoon, and showed off some cool threading/pipeline syntax-rules macro, and showed how this compared to Python, showing how it reduces boilerplate in a way impossible to do in Python.

Granted, this is in Germany, where CS education is not really all that great, and most universities teach boring Java or C++ or something.

At least we had a RacketCon in Berlin some time ago, and I was fortunate enough to have a prof at university, who at least introduced Dr.Scheme. His motto was: "I am not here to teach you C, Java, or Python. I am here to teach you computer programming." (translated) He went on to introduce languages of various paradigms, from Prolog, to Dr.Scheme (predecessor of Racket), to C, and Python. Thank you Prof. von Löwis.

Racket has been able to produce standalone executables for a while now.

I agree. In 2020 we had to manipulate some Moodle files. I wrote the code in Racket and I sent the ".exe" file to my coworkers, that never knew they were using Racket.

For years, really.

Not only do I produce standalone executables in Racket, I cross-compile GUI apps written on MacOS to produce executables for Windows.

I wrote my own AI coding harness in Racket, it works fine, meets my own needs. I did earlier versions in Common Lisp and Python but the Racket version is the most full featured.

Given that a lot of people use it in the wild I’m not sure where you’re getting that from.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/exe.html

Naughty Dog uses Racket for all their scripting...

Naughty Dog was a great example of how productive Scheme can be in the hands of a few expert programmers. Founders attended MIT and CMU.

GOAL and GOOL were used in Jak and Dexter, Crash Bandicoot, and apparently brought back in The Last of Us:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Unsynced: The Last of Us Melee System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox2H3kUQByo&t=2260s

In this 2014 GDC session, Naughty Dog's Anthony Newman shares an overview of the design and implementation of the melee system for The Last of Us.

Here is a project started in 2020 to reverse engineer the runtime and language which has playable games now:

https://opengoal.dev/

https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-sept-2020

The OpenGOAL project is a project to reverse engineer the Jak and Daxter video games and the custom programming language they were developed in: GOAL.

The long-term objective of the project is to make Jak and Daxter run natively on a PC by decompiling and recompiling it with OpenGOAL, our reverse engineered version of GOAL for x86-64 PCs. We do not host any game assets or copyrighted material from the game – we only host tools for reverse engineering and porting the game. The user must provide a copy of the game to use our tools.

We use it - specifically we use its Scribble package to define self-documented file formats that autogenerate C++ & Python sources.

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