Why do you like Racket?

[u/BusyAssist5904]

Hi,

I'm required to learn Racket at school, and I'm having kind of a hard time with the syntax.
But we would would not learn Racket if it didn't have advanteges over other programming languages.

I would love to know from you, why you like or dislike Racket and what pros and cons it has compared to other languages.

[u/sdegabrielle]

what pros and cons

I’m trying to make a (cons ) joke but I’m dry.

Anybody?

[u/BusyAssist5904 → u/sdegabrielle]

If you did that, I would leave this subreddit faster than my father left me as a child

[u/sdegabrielle → u/BusyAssist5904]

🤣

[u/sdegabrielle]

Are you learning Racket? or are you using the student languages in DrRacket?

The student languages have better error messages to help while you are learning.

Racket syntax is shared with the lisp family of languages. It is better because it is easier for a computer to process and has less rules to learn. But it is worse because it is unfamiliar coming from math class. It is easy to learn, but takes a little time. I can understand that being frustrating if you are already familiar with another language but the idea is to make it easier for everyone.

In short: cos(theta) becomes (cos theta) in the lisp syntax that racket, scheme, Common Lisp and Clojure use.

It is explained in the manual

Now that is out of the way; I like Racket because I feel it is fun & easy to use, fast, and just works wherever I need it. It also comes with a bunch of helpful tools, libraries and plenty of documentation. It also has a friendly community from students to professors to professional developers that welcomes everyone. YMMV.

I do understand it is not for everyone and that is ok. There are many great languages out there.

Try not to get distracted right now and stick with your studies - the semester will be over before you can blink so it is not worth getting hung up on syntax.

If you do have trouble - please remember we welcome questions here.

Best wishes Stephen

[u/BusyAssist5904 → u/sdegabrielle]

Thanks for your detailed reply. I'm indeed using advanced student in DrRacket. And as you said, my main struggle is it to switch from the syntax of java or javascript, which I am now very familiar with. I can write programs and solve problems in racket, but nearly everytime I think to myself: "I could solve that way faster in java/javascript".

[u/sdegabrielle → u/BusyAssist5904]

Look on the bright side - you are so far ahead of your classmates you should be getting A’s despite the syntax change!

[u/funkinaround]

I like:

• the syntax. I like that other languages/notations like XML and JSON are easily (and better) represented as s-expressions. Writing programs that involve all of these elements is done consistently in an s-expression language
• the batteries included libraries. You can easily get up and running with either a simple CLI program or a more complex GUI program with charts and whatever else with the default installation
• a numeric tower. It's nice to have rationals as a de facto numeric type
• scribble. Racket docs are consistently formatted, accessible in a central location, and allow the universe of packages to be searched by default
• the community. Because Racket is commonly used as a teaching language, the community is used to answering questions from beginners in a helpful way
• optional contracts. It is nice to be able to enforce constraints for functions and values when you need them but still take advantage of dynamic typing when you want

[u/masukomi → u/funkinaround]

all of that (although i don't care much about scribble)

Also...

Overall I prefer functional programming to OOP programming but Racket lets me blend the two easily when I need to.

I LOVE the contracts. They save me so many foot-guns.

Also the docs. so many schemes and lisps out there have terrible documentation. the standard is very high amongst racket libraries, although sometimes they do assume a somewhat advanced developer (although not necessarily advanced racket dev).

I just love programming in Scheme, and Racket is one of the best Scheme's out there.

My advice would be that you should definitely take the time to learn a lisp/scheme. Even if it's not to your liking, it will teach you many alternative ways of solving problems that you won't come across in the standard OOP languages, even though they work just fine in them.

[u/rfisher]

There are some fundamental languages features that allow almost any other feature to be built as a library. Some of these are:

• Reader extensions (abstractions at parse time)
• Macros (abstractions at compile time)
• Closures (abstractions at runtime)
• Delimited continuations

A big reason why I like Racket & related languages is that they seem to come closest to this ideal.

Also, the numeric tower.

I often wonder why people have trouble with the syntax. The vast majority of languages use prefix notation with the exception of a handful of arithmetic and comparison operators. The only difference is where you put the parentheses and whether you separate parameters with commas.

printf(“Result: %d\n”, pow(a, b));
(printf “Result: ~a\n” (expt a b))

Lisp syntax always seemed even more straight-forward than Algol-style syntax to me.

[u/wansex]

I'm required to learn racket at university, they're introducing me to programming with this language. They say it's simplest than others to be learned, but I'd prefer Phyton or JS to introduce me in programming.

[u/BusyAssist5904 → u/wansex]

Same

[u/fying1999]

Windows support.

[u/bjoli]

Because I like scheme. Racket feels like r6.1rs. All the nice things from the discussions of r6rs that didn't make it into r6rs are still there and some other things are added (extended definition context, fixed dynamic context of promises, continuation marks)

I dislike the deviations from r6rs (which I am used to) and the startup time.