Racket branch of Chez Scheme merging with mainline Chez Scheme

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • remember

    Stash distractions away for later. (by Bogdanp)

  • dev

    Development repository for the CodeMirror editor project

  • I don’t think the arrows are possible with VScode?

    Someone said they might be possible with CodeMirror https://codemirror.net/

    (Just in general - not specifically for racket- I’d love to see this for rust and elixir)

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  • SCP-061

  • ChezScheme

    Chez Scheme

  • The main line of Chez Scheme is here:

    https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme

    There is more work to be done before release 10.0.

  • livebook

    Automate code & data workflows with interactive Elixir notebooks

  • That's hard to say. Racket is a rather complete language, as is F# and Elixir. And F# and Racket are extremely capable multi-paradigm languages, supporting basically any paradigm. Elixir is a bit more restricted in terms of its paradigms, but that's a feature oftentimes, and it also makes up for it with its process framework and deep VM support from the BEAM.

    I would say that the key difference is that F# and Elixir are backed by industry whereas Racket is primarily backed via academia. Thus, the incentives and goals are more aligned for F# and Elixir to be used in industrial settings.

    Also, both F# and Elixir gain a lot from their host VMs in the CLR and BEAM. Overall, F# is the cleanest language of the three, as it is easy to write concise imperative, functional, or OOP code and has easy asynchronous facilities. Elixir supports macros, and although Racket's macro system is far more advanced, I don't think it really provides any measurable utility over Elixir's. I would also say that F# and Elixir's documentation is better than Racket's. Racket has a lot of documentation, but it can be a little terse at times. And Elixir definitely has the most active, vibrant, and complete ecosystem of all three languages, as well as job market.

    The last thing is that F# and Elixir have extremely good notebook implementations in Polyglot Notebooks (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...) and Livebook (https://livebook.dev/), respectively. I would say both of these exceed the standard Python Jupyter notebook, and Racket doesn't have anything like Polyglot Notebooks or Livebook. (As an aside, it's possible for someone to implement a Racket kernel for Polyglot Notebooks, so maybe that's a good side project for me.)

    So for me, over time, it has slowly whittled down to F# and Elixir being my two languages that I reach for to handle effectively any project. Racket just doesn't pull me in that direction, and I would say that Racket is a bit too locked to DrRacket. I tried doing some GUI stuff in Racket, and despite it having an already built framework, I have actually found it easier to write my own due to bugs found and the poor performance of Racket Draw.

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