racket VS Elm

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.

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/