[HN Gopher] New Racket Language Website
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New Racket Language Website
Author : kamaal
Score : 240 points
Date : 2020-08-26 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (racket-lang.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (racket-lang.org)
| benatkin wrote:
| If it has a photo where people aren't wearing masks and/or social
| distancing, it doesn't feel new to me.
| superdisk wrote:
| I went to look at the picture and noticed I'm actually in it!
| Cool. The pic was taken at RacketCon 2018.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is there still a blog / news section? I don't see a link to
| those?
| azhenley wrote:
| If you click the "Community" tab it is listed. More hidden than
| it used to be.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Its in the footer: https://blog.racket-lang.org/
| discardable_dan wrote:
| Compare it to other big language websites, like Kotlin [1] or Go
| [2], this page really seems to have a poor signal to noise ratio.
| There is a _lot_ of information on this landing page, and a lot
| of it is getting in the way. For a language, I want to know (a)
| features, (b) documentation / how to learn, (c) community. This
| website leads with this, but does so under playful headings
| ("jet-fueled") that just lead to more click-through links, and
| then immediately, on the _landing page_ , jumps into advanced
| features (easy DSLs, IDE support, etc.). 2/3 of this landing page
| could be removed, and I suspect it would be a better landing page
| for it.
|
| In addition, it suffers from a poor use of vertical space (you
| will see the word "Racket" in a large font with plenty of padding
| 4 times on the main page), poor usage and indication of
| navigation (it has 4 navbars, which are not apparently navigation
| but appear to be "selling points" until your mouse moves over
| them, due to their being attached to headings), and poor use of
| navigation (reflowing the main page nave when you click on nav
| items). Compare this to Kotlin and Go's sites, which state the
| name, gives a snappy summary of the language, and then links off
| to more information. In the case of Kotlin, which is closer to
| Racket's site, it presents immediate links to extensive, example-
| driven write-ups about the most-important features on subpages,
| uses the remaining of the "first page" space on a "try it now"
| box, and then proceeds along vertical space (free in a browser)
| to demonstrate the most-important features.
|
| Finally, a smaller complaint: this website feels like it was made
| in Photoshop in the mid-00s, complete with text-image navigation
| bars sliced out of tables and drop shadows. I know someone put a
| lot of work into making divs look like that, but there are very
| good reasons why the industry has moved away from that design.
|
| 1. https://kotlinlang.org/
|
| 2. https://golang.org/
| yomly wrote:
| I'm biased, but I clicked through to Kotlin and it didn't have
| any mobile friendly media queries - whereas I like the look and
| feel of the racket page on my tiny android screen.
| didibus wrote:
| Same, Kotlin is a huge fail, if you can't get mobile friendly
| pages in 2020 it's a complete fail in my book.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| At first I was going to say "I agree... in 2020 there's no
| reason not to have a mobile-friendly docs site... but in my
| experience with documentation sites, not many people visit
| from mobile devices". However, I just checked web.dev and
| developers.google.com/web and our mobile traffic is non-
| trivial.
| nkrisc wrote:
| As a hobbyist and self-taught programmer I (pre-COVID)
| spent a lot of time reading documentation on my phone while
| commuting home from work.
|
| I'm very pleased when documentation works well on a mobile
| device.
| neilv wrote:
| In earlier discussion of a draft, a year ago, I looked at a
| bunch of examples, and zeroed in on Nim's home page (at the
| time) as a possible good example/inspiration for Racket
| (especially since I was pushing on a "3 ideas" focus, which,
| IIRC, Nim was also doing):
|
| https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-dev/kJciZheDM...
|
| I think a few pretty ordinary challenges are:
|
| * Collectively, people think a lot of stuff is important, and
| don't want to drop it from the home page. A vicious designer
| would step in and cull and massage heavily, ignoring the
| screams of pain from most people. (Only in the end, might
| people generally agree it was worth the suffering, and then
| they'd help beat down anyone who tried to sneak bloat back in,
| after the carnage that everyone went through to get there.)
|
| * The people in charge and doing the work on the site, as a
| group, don't have the same ideas of what's important that
| professional practitioners do, nor the state of competition.
| So, priorities, phrasings, assertions, etc. will sometimes seem
| odd. This has come up at least a few times, in various ways,
| and might be part of why Racket didn't go mainstream when it
| had a better chance. (Though the leadership is not just pure
| academics. Just to pick the most prominent example, Prof.
| Matthew Flatt, besides the research and domain background, is a
| very solid programmer, with some good sense of software
| engineering.)
|
| * As a subset of general visual design, good graphic designers
| seem to do many subtle things that us techies don't fully
| appreciate. Familiar analogy: a novice software developer not
| only isn't yet able to do great work on tricky problems, but
| they don't even yet know what great work is, nor are they able
| to say what's great and not about some example they see. (The
| creators of the new site are mainly programming language and CS
| education people, not visual design, not HCI, etc., except
| sometimes people like [1].)
|
| On the upside, if a site for some techie thing looks a bit
| homely or awkward in some ways, you know it's at least not a
| tech offering driven by marketing, fashion, and funding. :)
|
| [1] One notable exception in Racket, though I don't know
| whether involved with the new site, is Matthew Butterick, as a
| diversely multi-skilled person. He did a lot of visual/graphic
| design work on other Racket stuff, which you can see by
| contrasting the old look of the documentation, with the current
| one. Old: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-
| source/neil/roomba.plt... Current: https://docs.racket-
| lang.org/roomba/index.html
| somezero wrote:
| 1/3 of Go's website on my iOS screen, is "Recent news" plus a
| random "featured video". For a landing page of a programming
| language, This is cartoonishly bad.
| overthetop2 wrote:
| > made in Photoshop in the mid-00s
|
| Haha, so true. TBH I didn't care for the previous Racket home
| page ... too arty farty. But at least it felt clean and
| current. This one, by contrast, feels totally retrograde. I
| wonder who made it? Hard for me to imagine a front-end designer
| today who would turn in work like this.
|
| Oh god I just noticed the drop shadows on the menus ...
| :facepalm:
| rscho wrote:
| Maybe you could offer your services to make it better? Since
| they're a small open source community, my guess is that they
| don't have front-end designers of your calibre.
| valbaca wrote:
| Looking good!
|
| potential off-topic but this make me think of this:
|
| Can one work through SICP using Racket?
| vvillena wrote:
| There's a #lang sicp in Racket that emulates the Scheme of the
| SICP book, with all the functions you need.
| kaeland wrote:
| I found this SICP guide helpful in terms of choosing which lisp
| to work through the book: https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Yep, will even say is the best enviroment for SICP.
| Naac wrote:
| I believe this is the source code for the Racket lang website:
| https://github.com/racket/racket-lang-org
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'm relieved they didn't change the documentation. Hard to
| improve on perfection. https://docs.racket-
| lang.org/pkg/index.html
|
| Also, I chuckled a bit at the "Jet Fueled" tagline. Racket's
| green threads operate with a "fuel" which gets consumed over
| time, at which point it yields to another thread. I think the
| metaphor was a happy accident rather than an intentional nerdy
| reference, but still.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| The engine/fuel terminology is not new, it comes from the 1986
| paper "Abstracting Timed Preemption with Engines" / Christopher
| T. Haynes, Daniel P. Friedman:
|
| ftp://ftp.extreme.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR178.pdf
| 1f60c wrote:
| Did this link just get hugged to death? It's not working for
| me...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It works for me, but I've mirrored it here:
| https://www.shawwn.com/docs/1986-11-abstracting-timed-
| preemp...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I absolutely adore that this link isn't clickable, yet it
| works when you copy-paste it into Chrome.
|
| @dang, here's an updated version of valid-url which will make
| the link clickable: (defmemo valid-url (url)
| (and (len> url 10) (or (begins url "http://")
| (begins url "https://") (begins url
| "ftp://")) (~find [in _ #\< #\> #\" #\'] url)))
|
| I doubt it'll get merged, but you never know.
|
| It looks like the other change necessary is in the `markdown`
| function. It checks: (and (or (litmatch
| "http://" s i) (litmatch "https://" s i)
|
| You'd need to add: (litmatch
| "ftp://" s i)
|
| If you grep the codebase for "https" then it'll reveal any
| other functions that need updates, but these are the only two
| in arc3.1.
|
| Of course, the cost-benefit doesn't quite add up here - it's
| not like ftp links are too common. But think of the poor
| university FTP servers! They'll be forever doomed to copy-
| paste-hell unless this is fixed. :-(
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Firefox removed FTP support some months ago. Ironically
| when I copy paste that link it now prompts me to open it in
| Chromium.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Works for FF 79, Manjaro Linux
|
| Maybe it was removed for the Windows build? If so, what a
| bad decision, maybe for security reasons?
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/04/13/what-to-
| expect-fo...
|
| I normally use FF Nightly which explains the difference.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We also have "optimization fuel" in Rust,
| https://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-
| reo...
|
| Which comes from http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06/debugging-
| compilers-with-opti..., which cites a paper from 93.
| look_lookatme wrote:
| And don't forget this beautiful book on Racket,
| https://beautifulracket.com/
| didip wrote:
| It looks great! If I may offer a suggestion, it could use a
| "play" section where people can start getting to know the
| language right away without installing anything.
| gus_massa wrote:
| There are a few unofficial sites, for example PasteRack
| http://pasterack.org/. (A example of Fibonacci:
| http://pasterack.org/pastes/89478 )
| grugagag wrote:
| There is also wescheme: https://www.wescheme.org/openEditor
| miloandmilk wrote:
| Yep it looks great, really crisp - +1 for the play section!
| agumonkey wrote:
| nice spin on the proglang homepage, 'KISS
| hitekker wrote:
| A compressed header that looks good on mobile? Wow.
|
| The rest of the design looks well crafted too.
| dependenttypes wrote:
| I think that it is quite nice, much better than most most modern
| sites (it does not seem to require js for example and it loads
| quickly) and I prefer it to the older one. My only is that it
| makes poor use of horizontal space - my screen is bigger
| horizontally than vertically, so much space goes wasted. In
| addition I would suggest offering more examples of sublanguages,
| such as of #lang racket/gui which the last site included.
|
| Anyway, good work!
| codazoda wrote:
| I didn't sign in too far, but isn't the first line of code on
| their landing page a typo?
|
| (define my-language 'English)
|
| Looks like it's missing a closing single quote. I suppose it
| could be optional.
| thomas11 wrote:
| The code is correct. That's a Lisp thing called `quote`.
| https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Pairs__Lists__and_Racket_...
| cpill wrote:
| Oh boy, what the world needs now: another Clojure. How is it
| going to compete with the raging success of that :D
| rscho wrote:
| ...and if you had a single clue about all that you'd know that
| Racket and Clojure are very different and that Racket is a
| strong player in the academic world.
| vga805 wrote:
| If you have nothing productive to say, don't comment. It really
| is that simple.
|
| And Racket is almost a decade older than Clojure.
| cek wrote:
| My son was required to use Racket in his course work for Computer
| Engineering at CalPoly. I had never heard of it before. I recall
| one of the profs was involved. We joked that it all sounded like
| a racket.
|
| He's now a rising-star (proud/biased papa here) as an SDE at
| Amazon. So maybe it's a good teaching language after all.
| rscho wrote:
| The community has strong emphasis on teaching. I'm just a
| hobbyist, but transitioning from python allowed me to improve
| much faster and discover new horizons.
| linguae wrote:
| I'm also a Cal Poly graduate (computer science) who learned
| Racket (called PLT Scheme back when I was a Cal Poly student)
| from Professor John Clements (https://www.brinckerhoff.org),
| who was involved with PLT Scheme. We used the textbook
| Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, which
| can be found at http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/.
| I'm sorry to say that at the time I took the course, I didn't
| appreciate it. I loved coding in C and I thought Scheme was
| weird. But after taking programming languages from Professor
| Clements, I then took his compilers course. Our first
| assignment was to implement a Scheme interpreter in a week. We
| were allowed to use any programming language we wanted. Since I
| was tired of Scheme, my lab partner and I decided to implement
| the interpreter in C++. Big mistake....we spent 40 hours on
| that project, building complex class inheritance hierarchies
| and not being able to take advantage of many of the features
| that made writing an interpreter in Scheme a relative breeze. I
| never complained about writing code in Scheme again.
|
| When I moved on to UC Santa Cruz for grad school, my experience
| with Professor Clements' programming languages and compilers
| courses made my required graduate programming language course
| with type theory expert Cormac Flanagan a relatively smooth
| experience; going from Scheme to Haskell wasn't too difficult.
| Sometime afterwards I got bit very hard by the programming
| languages bug. I'm now working on a side project in Common
| Lisp, and interestingly enough, I'm actually teaching a
| programming language paradigms course at San Jose State
| University this semester where I'll be teaching my students
| Scheme, Prolog, and Smalltalk, as well as other goodies such as
| the lambda calculus.
|
| All of this would have not been possible had I not been taught
| Scheme and functional programming by Professor John Clements.
| If he is reading this, I thank him immensely for the impact his
| courses have had on my career. I just wish I had appreciated
| the courses back when I took them, but over a decade later, I
| strongly appreciate them, and they're among the most valuable
| courses I had at Cal Poly.
| ska wrote:
| Racket is an evolution/rebranding of a scheme variant (Dr
| Scheme) - or rather family of them - specifically designed for
| pedagogy. It's got a pretty good multiple decade history in
| that space, fwiw.
| miloandmilk wrote:
| I don't use Racket every day - but I use many of the things I
| learnt from HTDP every single day. Great language guided by some
| very generous people.
| chromatin wrote:
| Would Racket be an appropriate first language for a thoughtful 11
| year old who has the gift of abstract thought (relatively; we are
| not talking Haskell here) ?
| codr7 wrote:
| I would say Lisp is a fine beginners language, but it all
| depends on the teacher.
|
| One reason why SICP works so well is that the authors are very
| passionate about Lisp. K&R accomplishes sort of the same thing
| for C. Many languages have these kinds of books.
|
| I got into Lisp from reading Paul Grahams essays and books.
|
| One of my younger brothers eventually found his way into
| programming heaven via Bash scripts.
|
| My point is the medium matters less.
| rscho wrote:
| I'm just a passionate hobbyist, but I'd say yes. The integrated
| environment makes it very easy to get started, the package
| manager makes using libs trivial and there are DSLs for
| basically all programming paradigms under the sun.
|
| In my opinion, nothing beats it. You even have pictures in the
| REPL.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Perhaps they could come up with something different for the first
| header? Because saying "Racket, the Language-Oriented Programming
| Language" right after "Racket, the Programming Language" seems a
| little too similar.
| grok22 wrote:
| That seems intentional -- the 2nd header is to highlight that
| it has features that help in creating your own language variant
| (and is a big-part of it's many strengths).
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yeah, I think it is-however, it's still strange to have those
| two and then the third "Racket, the Ecosystem" that doesn't
| seem to fit the pattern.
| jakearmitage wrote:
| The #lang thing is super interesting. What happens with
| conflicts, though? Can I use multiple #lang? What if they have
| functions with the same names?
| PuercoPop wrote:
| You can use multiple #langs, in separate files. The name
| collision is unrelated to the #lang of the file. It is handled
| by the module system.
| submeta wrote:
| Beautifully made. Like the font. And how legible it is on mobile
| devices. - Learned Scheme and worked through SICP with its
| predecessor DrScheme twenty years ago. - Keep up the good work.
| MarkyC4 wrote:
| portrait tablet/landscape mobile could use some work (it's a
| bit squished)
|
| https://i.imgur.com/KLSZ33H.png https://i.imgur.com/b9HXnfj.png
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(page generated 2020-08-26 23:00 UTC)