Saturday, August 7, 2010

Racket, can it be a Good Thing?

On June, 7th 2010 PLT Scheme changed name. Now it is called Racket.
I will not indulge in how bad does it sound (especially if you live in countries where racket is a social plague). I bet if some developer had his project dubbed "Rape" (Recursive Anamorphic Program Environment?) some people would argue. However, the authors do like it, and that's it.

PLT Scheme was a very good programming environment. I love scheme. I love Planet. There is a huge quantity of modules (which is something I really appreciate as a pythonista) and they are not only academic tools. Which is good. This comes with Racket as well.

Before the name change, PLT scheme was somewhat different from most scheme environments out there. First, it came batteries included. And as someone new to the platform I often found myself using functions which were srfi or even non standard. In both cases some alternative platforms I used did non include them. This was somewhat annoying...

Moreover the #scheme first line makes a "scheme" source non valid scheme. Thus this was not a minor issue to work with multiple environments. These stuffs is rather trivial to solve, simply I would have preferred to spend my time currying rather that understanding how each scheme environment extended r5rs with modules and make things r6rs compatible as well.

At least now it is Racket. It's based on scheme, but it's not scheme (which is something that, when done by Microsoft is regarded as a criminal offense). So I don't have to expect my racket programs work with scheme compilers.

Moreover, you can write in your CV:
IT skills: racket

... and that is not something to underestimate.

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