A Friendly Introduction to Racket

> no special syntax for anything.

    (list '(1. . #\#)
          -5/6+7.s-8i
          `(1 ,@2)
          1@1           ;hmmm, no unquote splicing comma ;-)
          10#           ;surprised?
          (list #i+1 +1i 1+i) ;complicated or complex?
          #e-1e10i     ;Old MacDonald?
          "(* 9 10)" #())

> In The Amazing Digital Circus (episode 8, "hjsakldfhl"), when Kinger opens the terminal to try to reset Caine, you can see that Caine (a creative AI built in 1996) is programmed in Lisp. The file is literally named Caine-core.lisp.

Nice touch. Explains how Caine returns in episode 9: Lisp continuations allow for graceful error recovery.

Much as I am a fan of Racket, this is not a friendly intro. It is a speedrun.

When an introduction says “friendly”, I don’t expect it to assume that I know what lambda is.

When an introduction says “friendly”, I don’t expect syntax rules to appear in it. At all.

Btw - if people are interested in Racket related blogs / articles etc.

https://racket-stories.com/

While the language is interesting, sadly, nobody is using it in the wild. Maybe due to cumbersome deployment options? The ability to produce native standalone executables would boost its usage I believe.

Mild nitpick, but on Janet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26496339

any time the topic of racket comes up, i wonder if there are any interesting apps i could explore. but all i find is libraries and dev tools: https://awesome-racket.com/

I've never seen the appeal in schemes other than hot reloadability...

Thanks for sharing. It's been bookmarked :)

  .-.
 / λ \
 '---'

Nothing against Lisp, but to correct the record:

> For decades, Lisp was the language of artificial intelligence. [...] Then came the "AI winter," funding dried up, and Lisp went from star to cult language.

Lisp had fallen from relevance before then. Only the United States was still using it, and mostly out of technical debt and a stubborn refusal to move on. Prolog displaced it in the late 1970s, and even within the US, the Lisp part was an unfortunate implementation detail to get to a Prolog-shaped object. It's not surprising that the US fell way behind Japan in this area in the 1980s. Anybody who would imply they would take a Lisp machine over a PIM is either not interested in symbolic computation and just likes Lisp, or they're doing so out of total ignorance of how much more advanced the PIMs were for symbolic AI.

The cutting edge was with Prolog, and that's still the case today. Nobody's researching MIL in Lisp, even in America.

Very cool! Always was interested in racket, I will try writing Black Jack in it!

Will definitely try it.

I've been designing my own small language runtime in Rust (VM + JIT + AOT backends) mostly as a way to actually understand tradeoffs compiler authors make instead of just reading about them. Racket's approach to macros and language-oriented programming is one of the things I keep coming back to as a reference curious how much of that flexibility comes at a real runtime cost vs. being mostly a compile-time abstraction.

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