[HN Gopher] Beautiful Racket (2016) ___________________________________________________________________ Beautiful Racket (2016) Author : gurjeet Score : 101 points Date : 2022-05-12 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (beautifulracket.com) (TXT) w3m dump (beautifulracket.com) | gurjeet wrote: | I had read the post [1] here on HN at the time, about how he | faced abuse in the Racket community, but when posting this | submission I did not recognize the author of the book was the | one. | | I'm glad his work hit the frontpage. This would hopefully attract | more attention to his work, as well as the problem in the Racket | community, if the problem still persists. | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27531508 | arimbaud wrote: | After that piece appeared on HN, Racket leadership posted an | apology [1] but didn't announce any changes to their policies | or procedures to prevent the issue from recurring. In | particular, there were no consequences for the person in Racket | leadership who had committed the abuse | | [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/racket- | users/c/7F4Y5Xsdny8/m/r_g... | nextos wrote: | Matthew Butterick's work is pretty well known within Racket and | has brought many people to the language. | | I found it sad to read he had been bullied by Matthias | Felleisen and as a consequence no longer contributes to Racket. | It is a big loss, and I hope something can be done to bring him | back. | Pet_Ant wrote: | Interesting model, it's an honor system to a read "free" (as in | not toll-gated) book on the web, with a starter price of $40 USD. | https://beautifulracket.com/how-to-pay.html | | I admire the model, and the try-before-you-buy but somehow paying | $10 for a book I won't get around to reading ever most likely is | a lot more appealing, whereas starting a book knowing that I | should pay $40 somehow is off-putting enough to not make me want | to try. | | Good on the author for being creative. Just sharing how my grey | mush responds to the whole situation. | themodelplumber wrote: | It's really curious that in terms of energy spent on a problem, | the site seemingly ranks feedback regarding price & price | complaints higher in annoyance than freeloaders who pay nothing | & say nothing. Feedback about pricing is also categorized under | excuses, and boiled down to a simple set. | | The boiling down builds on the implication that the author is | happier if you are a freeloader than a feedback-giver, | especially if your feedback meets the condition that you aren't | yet comfortable paying. | | This is also just as true if you are trying to give the author | any amount of money, as long as it's less than $40 and you | aren't a student. | | So, you could be fully employed but living on a strict budget | so you can move out of an unhealthy living situation, and | decide that the book was worth your time to read but that you | don't have the money, and then discover that the author thinks | of you as "bro" and boils your exceptions down to "I already | heard it." And that's just one example. | | If you have questions about why you should pay, you will have | to exert more energy than a freeloader (in time spent | reading/parsing/contacting the author about your proposal | that's higher than $5). | | This is a problem. Sure, the book being free is "generous," | especially if you're a freeloader, but the book is also very | not free and the author makes this clear to the reader. Readers | are considered to be reading under tacit subjective agreement | governed by the author's published pricing frameworks. | | The author (I don't know them, nor have I read the book) also | seems rooted to the concept of intrinsic value. A lot of people | in programming are not, and find it not only foreign, but a | highly subjective, awkward way to request a judgement of | others. Some people are really bad at deciding what is "worth" | their time and many people do not actually think of their time | in this way. Many of those same people also really want to | support their community with what amounts to boundless | creativity, if they can. | | Like a lot of people who use the phrase "vote with your | wallet," the author ends up redirecting a lot of the purchasing | conversation to an either-or dichotomy: Worth it, not worth it. | However in reading the details, it's clear that the author is | also aware of a number of different ways of looking at the | value of the book, but those ways aren't directly involved in | the pricing mechanic. This reads strangely and creates an | unnecessarily awkward hand-wave effect. | | Racket is presumably a very nuanced language. I wonder if the | book's audience is really comfortable with such a binary | treatment of the customer & payment mechanic. | | I think a really good start in repackaging this situation, as | an author, would be to first determine exactly how much you | need to make to keep the book alive. Especially if the book is | in danger of not surviving/living on. What does it mean to you, | in terms of expense, to keep the book alive? What is the | minimum you'd accept yearly, for example? This is probably a | huge point of leverage in communicating with the readers. | | An exact number is important, because it's pretty unfair and | inconsiderate to ask that the book's best audience blindly | subscribe to a potentially limitless concept of paying the high | end of the spectrum for works that are also free-to-most, in | order to keep a book "alive". Especially if it's also fair to | say that the book is of potentially infinite worth to the | author, because this does not also reflect the reality of a | single book in the market in isolation and could really muddy | the emotional waters of charging money for something for which | one could never be paid enough, if being honest in one's own | intrinsic-value view. | | Even if you think it can never be reached, publish the number. | Update it as you make money and update the pricing model as | things get better. | | This would be much more fair to those who like the book, but | who also grasp the inequity of the situation as it stands. | fn-mote wrote: | > nor have I read the book | | My background: unlike the parent, I have read the book. I am | a freeloader, but I am a _grateful_ freeloader. It 's clear | love and effort went into producing the book. | | Frankly, I think the "tl;dr" response above by someone who | hasn't even read the book totally justifies the author's | alleged dismissal. The author set the price. The author | doesn't want to hear your complaints/criticism/feedback that | their pricing is wrong. I believe that is their right. | | I think this is exactly the same situation as a startup | trying to convert free customers to the paying tier. There | are free customers that you don't really want as customers. | You set your price so you don't have to deal with them... | [deleted] | dang wrote: | Related: | | _Beautiful Racket_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17033533 - May 2018 (53 | comments) | | _Beautiful Racket v1.0_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881535 - March 2017 (58 | comments) | | _Beautiful Racket_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220237 - March 2016 (53 | comments) | uneekname wrote: | Before I started feeling comfortable with the official Racket | docs, Beautiful Racket served as an accessible reference as I | began exploring the language. | | I'm turning into a big Racket fan. I just rewrote my website's | backend in Racket [0], and I've been learning how to publish | packages for the ecosystem. | | [0] https://github.com/jacobwhall/jacobhall.net ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-12 23:00 UTC)