racket VS clojure

Racket! https://racket-lang.org/

“Whenever an engineer changes one of these programs, we run all the programs through our custom model checker (written in Racket + Rosette)”

- pipe operator

It compiles to either erlang or JavaScript, so I was able to jump right into building something fun with a new language.

>I previously gave Clojure a try, that was a pretty good fit, but the JVM / ecosystem put me off.

I felt similarly w/ leiningen (too much boilerplate) but was lisp-curious still so gave racket (https://racket-lang.org/) a try and appreciated the batteries included philosophy of the standard library and was inspired to learn more about writing a programming language (also see: https://beautifulracket.com/)

Biased recommendation: Try racket https://racket-lang.org/ It's not pure functional, but the preferred style is to use mostly functional constructs. (But you can cheat when it get's too difficult or you need some extra speed.) (And you can download packages like Qi that enable a new language inside Racket that has more support for functional style.)

(Most Schemes have a similar mostly-functional style, so you can also try one of them.)

It's a replacement for make, but definitively not a drop in replacement. To understand why, it's better to read the initial announcement/pull-request by Matthew https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/4179

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.

Glojure author here! Your analysis is spot-on :). I'll definitely take a look at clojure.core-test. As components mature, I focus on improving compatibility by porting tests from Clojure [0], but they often require modifications to accommodate differences in the host language. As you noted, there are still several fundamental features missing — most notably some core data structures. That said, the implementation is robust enough to support another non-trivial hobby project [1].

A bit more detail on some of your observations:

> No JIT or AOT compilation (right now).

I do plan to implement AOT compilation eventually. JIT, however, is more complex. Go's "plugin" standard library [2] could serve as a mechanism, but its support is limited and not without issues [3].

> it looks like the analysis could be largely a port of tools.analyzer

Exactly! Another key implementation strategy has been the handling of clojure.core. Instead of reimplementing everything from scratch, the Clojure 1.11 core libraries are programmatically transformed to work with Go [4]. However, this approach has its downsides — many functions appear to be available but are non-functional because parts of their implementation haven't yet been adapted.

And by the way, impressive progress on Jank! I've been following it closely and really admire the work you're doing.

[0] https://github.com/clojure/clojure/tree/master/test/clojure/...

Clojure is a LISP for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As a schemer, I wondered if I should give Clojure a go professionally. After all, I enjoy Rich Hickey's talks and even Uncle Bob is a Clojure fan. So I considered strength and weaknesses from my point of view:

Clojure

Here's what I mean by Malli's inability to check macros.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/ad54fec/src/jvm/cloj...

clojure.spec has a privileged spot in the compiler so that it can validate the data in macros. No other library can do this, because the Clojure compiler directly calls into clojure.spec and does not expose any sort of hook for validating macros.

‍For the rest of this post I’ll list off some more tactical examples of things that you can do towards this goal. Savvy readers will note that these are not novel ideas of my own, and in fact a lot of the things on this list are popular core features in modern languages such as Kotlin, Rust, and Clojure. Kotlin, in particular, has done an amazing job of emphasizing these best practices while still being an extremely practical and approachable language.

This article will explain how to write a simple service in Clojure. The sweet spot of making applications in Clojure is that you can expressively use an entire rich Java ecosystem. Less code, less boilerplate: it is possible to achieve more with less. In this example, I use most of the libraries from the Java world; everything else is a thin Clojure wrapper around Java libraries.

5. Clojure - $96,381

I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://clojure.org/

I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.