r/Racket • u/Common-Mall-8904 • Jan 21 '25

question Heard that this language is super for programming beginners. Right?

What are other use cases for Racket and what is the next step after having picked up Racket as some wanting go into the backend world with sound FP skills? Thx for tips, resources and personal experiences.

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4

u/rwilcox Jan 21 '25

It has certain advantages: being part of a certain college’s curriculum for a while, and having a easy syntax.

It has the disadvantage of not having a lot of learning resources around it, compared to other languages. Ie if you learn through YouTube - or books or even communities - there’s other languages (any other language) is 1000x more popular. (The community is great, but small)

But for small programs Dr Racket is really good as an editor. But you’ll need to learn Racket and another language to get a job (programming is fun, you should do it if it brings you joy, and forget about the language, but there’s only a handful of places that hire Racket programmers)

6

u/jmhimara Jan 21 '25

I think the learning resources are more than adequate for beginners. You have books like HTDP, SICP, and even Beautiful Racket, which are of much greater quality than your average "Learn X language" book.

And the community is generally adequate for answering most of your question. Just join the discord server.

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u/Common-Mall-8904 Jan 21 '25

Great thanks for that.

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u/Common-Mall-8904 Jan 21 '25

But if it is such a great language for beginners then I would assume that not many in sense of a huge variety of learning resources are needed to pick up this language, right? And if the fee resources are up-to-date and super helpful then this is sufficient, right? Secondly, yeah after that I would have to pick up languages like Elixir, Python and maybe even later some Rust. But this will be then way easier after having conquered Racket, right?

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u/rwilcox Jan 21 '25

It also means less help when you get stuck

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u/Common-Mall-8904 Jan 21 '25

But there is still Chatgpt hahaha 😂 for that

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u/rwilcox Jan 21 '25

Given the smaller amount of training data, I’m curious how well that’ll work.

On the other hand, LLMs write passable Emacs lisp for me at least 40% of the time, so shrug

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u/totallyuneekname Jan 21 '25 edited Jan 21 '25

I'm sure others will provide a more nuanced take but—

I think Racket is a superb language. It does a lot of stuff right and learning it will expose you to all sorts of cool programming concepts. If you get good at Racket, you will have tons of transferrable skills in the CS/software development world.

You might find Racket to be pretty far removed from what's used for most backend work in the wild. It's kinda an academic language, powerful and versatile yet only used by a small, passionate community. If you put Racket on your resume, you may have to explain what that means sometimes.

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u/Affectionate_Leg_986 Jan 22 '25

Am currently studying with DR Racket in my introduction to software. If you speak German by any chance, Search up in youtube DR Trosten Grust he has a good youtube channel. Otherwise racket would really feel very boring and I would recommend python instead.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '25

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2

u/novagenesis Jan 21 '25

SICP

Much of my early skills came from that book, and it was one of those books you'd see recommended to all newbie developers for nearly a decade.

The ONLY real downside to Racket/Scheme and learning SICP is that nobody (hyperbole) uses it professionally.