How to Program Racket

http://docs.racket-lang.org/style/index.html

by shawndumas • 11 years ago

71 18 11 years ago

bhrgunatha• 11 years ago

It's nice to see these written down and published. I think most large public projects should consider writing something similar, rather than leave it up to the reader to guess - and that includes the dreaded tabs/spaces, line length and naming decisions.

vince_refiti2• 11 years ago

This is the kind of thing sorely missing from other language teaching - once you learn the basics, how to write good, idiomatic code? Btw, I can also recommend Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns is you are learning Pharo Smalltalk.

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

Thanks for the reference, I just ordered a copy. I have been using Pharo lately and I need a brush up on good coding practices.

The linked article is good and surprised me, especially using 'define' inside functions instead of 'let'.

leoc• 11 years ago

A pre-publication version http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BestSmalltalkPract... is in Stéphane Ducasse's free collection of old Smalltak books http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/ , though not linked from that page for some reason.

vince_refiti2• 11 years ago

This has also surprised me. And it seems the main reason is that of indentation. I do not feel this is enough reason to use 'define' instead of 'let'.

draven• 11 years ago

once you learn the basics, how to write good, idiomatic code?

... apart from reading good source written by others, which you can't really find by yourself since you lack the "good taste" needed to judge the quality of a piece of code. I'd be interested in a compilation of good snippets of source code for several languages. For example (I may be wrong) like PAIP for Common Lisp.

michaelsbradley3• 11 years ago

How to Design Programs[1], while not an introduction to Racket per se, is a wonderful way to get started with the Lisp-family of languages and with computer programming in general.

Once you work all the way through Part 1 of the book, you really do get a sense that Felleisen, et al. are trying to teach you the why and how of good program design, not simply introduce you to a particular syntax.

A small study group has been meeting in St. Louis since mid October 2014[2]. Slowly but surely, we're working our way through HtDP2e and learning a lot from the book and each during as we go along.

[1] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

[2] http://www.meetup.com/STL-Racket/

hga3• 11 years ago

"not simply introduce you to a particular syntax"

I don't think Felleisen, et al. get that much credit for this, except of course in having the uncommon wisdom in choosing The One True Way ^_^, which for instruction is the simple Lisp dialect of Scheme. There's almost no syntax to teach, e.g. literals (e.g. numbers and strings), atoms, lists, and special forms like define/lambda and if. Which of course is a major reason to use a Lisp for introductory programming, you spend seconds to minutes instead of weeks teaching syntax (of course the students spend a bit more time in the lab learning how to use the editor to properly indent the code so it can be comprehended, but isn't that pretty much what you must do with Python??).

BTW, a counterargument I recently came across in the great SICP vs. HoDP conflict is that the latter has no "magic". Does that resonate with you? (I can't comment having started reading SICP back when it was a lively Technical Report.)

michaelsbradley3• 11 years ago

Re: syntax, what you say is true. There was a period late last night when HN comments could not be updated by their authors. Almost right away, I realized I could have expressed my point better: "...not simply introduce you to the authors' preferred language."

I have not spent much time with SICP, so I can't really make a comparison. But I can speculate a little: the point of HtDP is to lay the foundation for and then form the reader-student according to a systematic "design recipe" that is expanded and refined as one works through the book. Many of the deeper ideas and surprises of computer programming are not explored, as they are in SICP, so fans of the latter would probably find HtDP to be a "flatter" learning experience.

happywolf• 11 years ago

Curious the use of this language in industry. Appreciate if someone can share the use of Racket in production.

kogir• 11 years ago

Racket is the runtime powering HN. Arc targets it.

dzpower• 11 years ago

My craft + tech startup www.youpatch.com uses Racket for the clever bits: image-processing, pdf generation, and I find it's great for prototyping and R&D. Here's my talk wide-ranging talk about it (video and slides) http://agile-jitsu.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/my-talk-at-racket...

Also at RacketCon 2014 Brian Masterbrook talked about using Racket at www.airstash.com for testing hardware: links at con.racket-lang.org

soegaard• 11 years ago

Dan Liebgold (Naughty Dog) at RacketCon 2013.

"Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

gus_massa• 11 years ago

I use Racket to run an internal website for few hundreds of T.A. in my department in the university. I like that everything is escaped automatically, so you don't have to worry that someone try to use "<script>alert('test');</script>" as name.

brudgers• 11 years ago

For me this highlights one of the uniquie features of the Racket community. It tends to row in the same direction based on a shared core value: education. Coding style is not the primary way people express their inner snowflake. Partly because extending the Lisp is more satisfying and accessible even to relatively new community members and partly because there are more than 50 years of Lisp coding conventions to draw on and mostly because the PLI group has been standardizing coding conventions roughly by consensus in the form of HTDP for nearly fifteen years.

How to Program Racket

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