Matthew Flatt is a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he works on extensible programming languages, runtime systems, and applications of functional programming. If none of these succeed in scaring you off, well, then, go ahead and give it a try. Slides (how-racket-went-meta.pdf) 2.21MiB: Bio.You will be agonizingly aware of how much boilerplate you’re cranking out, and after every hour of shoveling Java, you will sneak off to the bathroom and write a tiny beautiful macro that no one will ever be allowed to see or use. Racket will ruin you for life as a Java developer. You’re not going to be able to search for code snippets on line with anything like the success rate that you’d have for JavaScript or Python or Java. Typed Racket is evolving rapidly, and even core Racket is getting fixes and new functionality every day. Racket is an experimental language: when the Racket team decides that the language should change, it does. I think there are currently fifty-five thousand packages available for Python. To make programming accessible and attractive to novices, DrScheme provides a thoroughly graphical environment and runs under several major windowing systems (Windows, MacOS, and Unix/X). Yes, there are lots of libraries available for Racket, but there are many more in, say, Python. The DrScheme programming environment 10 provides stu-dents and programmers with a user-friendly environment for developing Scheme programs. It’s not uncommon for a line to end with ten or twelve parentheses.Īlmost no mutation! Idiomatic Racket code doesn’t set the values of variables in loops, and it doesn’t set the values of result variables in if branches, and you can’t declare variables without giving them values, and Racket programmers hardly ever use classes with mutable fields. Here’s why:Īll those parentheses! Good Lord, the language is swimming in parentheses. You’re the kind of person who would do very badly with Racket. And people often ask me: “What do you think of Racket? Should I try it?” I’ve done a lot of programming in Racket.

Racket programming pdf