remember VS racket

Racket is my favorite language. It's fast, practical, has solid foundations and an extremely nice concurrency story (based on concepts borrowed and extended from Concurrent ML). It has an excellent documentation system, with an integrated package ecosystem, which means that most packages have high quality documentation with cross-references. It has a great backwards-compatibility story -- a lot better than Python's, for example, which I use in my current dayjob. So, my impression of the commenters saying it's too academic or not practical is that they probably never dove deeply enough, or they are students who were only exposed to the teaching languages in the past. It's definitely not perfect: the community is small, the runtime has a high memory baseline, parallelism requires spinning up a Racket VM per system thread, among others, but these are things that will improve over time.

In the past several years, I've:

* built & run an e-commerce site written in Racket[1]

* built a native macOS and iOS reminders app, available on the App Store [2, 3, 4]

* built a cross-platform desktop client for Apache Kafka [5, 6, 7]

* built a `#lang` for Lua [8]

Among[9] other[10] things[11]. I think that's all pretty practical stuff!

[1]: https://defn.io/2019/08/20/racket-ecommerce/

[2]: https://defn.io/2020/01/02/ann-remember/

[3]: https://defn.io/2024/04/09/ann-remember-for-ios/

[4]: https://github.com/bogdanp/remember

[5]: https://defn.io/2022/11/20/ann-franz/

[6]: https://defn.io/2023/10/15/ann-franz-for-windows/

[7]: https://defn.io/2023/08/10/ann-franz-source-available/

[8]: https://defn.io/2022/11/12/ann-racket-lua/

[9]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/http-easy/index.html

[10]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/deta/index.html

[11]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html

A really simple keyboard driven reminder tool for macOS:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember

My goal for this year is to continue building (mainly Mac and iOS) apps (like Remember[1] and Franz[2]) using Racket and to help improve the language and ecosystem in any way I can.

[1]: https://remember.defn.io

PS this is a macOS app with the GUI made with swift https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember/tree/master/cocoa/remember/remember but the backend is Racket.

Racket—the Language-Oriented Programming Language—version 8.12 is now available from https://racket-lang.org

See https://racket.discourse.group/t/racket-v8-12-is-now-availab... for the release announcement and highlights.

Thank you to the many people who contributed to this release!

Feedback Welcome

Racket version 8.11.1 is now available from https://racket-lang.org/

Racket (https://racket-lang.org) has an IDE (DrRacket) which isn't EMACS. ARC (which powers hacker news) is (was?) written in Racket.

Nice! Repeating a comment I just made on HN: I signed up for RacketCon, will be joining remotely. I am looking forward to it a lot. Usually I use the Racket language perhaps for 10% of my personal projects, but I am currently writing a Racket AI book, so all things Racket are of current interest. Past RacketCons have been a lot of fun. I usually use Common Lisp, but Racket is batteries included Scheme, and more, and is a very pleasant language and ecosystem. Just in case you don’t have Racket installed: https://racket-lang.org/

I signed up for RacketCon, joining remotely. I am looking forward to it a lot. Usually I use the Racket language perhaps for 10% of my personal projects, but I am currently writing a Racket AI book, so all things Racket are of current interest.

Past RacketCons have been a lot of fun.

I usually use Common Lisp, but Racket is batteries included Scheme, and more, and is a very pleasant language and ecosystem. Just in case you don’t have Racket installed: https://racket-lang.org/

I'd suggest Racket (https://racket-lang.org) which is a batteries-included language environment that includes scheme and has a lot of high-quality documentation.

Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) isn't quite as learner-focused but is another great choice.

How did I get to the bottom of the page and not ONE person has recommended racket?

The Racket fork of CS supports Apple Silicon natively, and can be installed independently: https://github.com/racket/racket/blob/master/racket/src/ChezScheme/BUILDING Chez adds a few features (threads, ffi, ...) to R6RS; there is a useful combined index to TSPL4 and the CS User Guide at http://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug9.5/csug_1.html

If you're using SICP in Scheme (or are you doing the JS version?) then you may want to look at How to Design Programs. It uses Racket which is a Scheme descendent so much of the language you've learned in SICP will work in it without issue. It also has a pretty good set of GUI and drawing capabilities you can find through the Racket docs page and will use some of with HTDP.