21:19 <gproto23> hey guys. does anyone have "Server: Racket—Practical Web Development with the Racket HTTP Server" book?

23:00 <mfiano> Hi there.

23:02 <mfiano> I am interested in exploring Racket, coming from many years of exclusive work in another Lisp language :)

23:04 <mfiano> One thing that is a bit dissuading is the continued emphasis I see about being a language-oriented programming language.

23:08 <reed[m]> I think that's largely got to do with the origin of Racket? it's by no means limited to that purpose. I'm no expert though - I've only been messing with Lisps casually for a little over a year and haven't written anything big in them. So I don't consider myself having really grokked what makes people such huge fans.

23:09 <reed[m]> But certainly it's possible to ignore the language-building features and jump straight to making projects in the language (that's what I did, aside from working through MButtericks Beautiful Racket book.)

23:09 <winny> from a practical point of view, you can treat `#lang racket` as the only racket you need

23:10 <reed[m]> Yeah, that's what I do

23:10 <reed[m]> it can complicate looking for packages, because a lot of them are languages built in Racket or require the use of other languages.

23:11 <mfiano> I understand that Lisps in general make it trivial to write new languages, be them DSLs or more general-purpose with macros and other extensibility features, but I just don't understand the emphasis on this in the media.

23:12 <mfiano> I, myself, have been working with Common Lisp for about 20 years, and never thought of any Lisp as a language-oriented language, even though you are essentially writing a compiler every time you abstract details away behind a macro.

23:13 <reed[m]> I think this emphasis is because it is literally what Racket was made for.

23:14 <mfiano> I consider it a general-purpose programming language with features that aid in extensibility and ultimate expressiveness.

23:14 <reed[m]> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_features

23:14 <reed[m]> > Note that one of Racket's main design goals is to accommodate creating new languages, both domain-specific languages and completely new languages.

23:14 <winny> Be extension I think some Racket beginners come to associate macros with language-writing. I don't think that's really the case. They're just great for managing complexity

23:17 <mfiano> As a game developer, hobbyist data visualizer/generative coder, I have been considering learning Racket for its cross-platform GUI support and library arsenal. It seems like a lot to learn and the focus seems to steer beginners towards this language-oriented aspect of the language, which may be interesting to PL theorists, but for those that want to learn a general purpose language to get work done, it just seems stra

23:17 <mfiano> makes me wonder if I should invest time into it.

23:18 <mfiano> Maybe I'm weird for thinking that.

23:24 <reed[m]> I think that the language is straight-forward enough that you can probably get right into building things, versus needing to go through the language-building materials

23:25 <reed[m]> especially because the documentation culture seems to be very high quality, and so things like the GUI libraries are fairly well documented

23:25 <reed[m]> s/high quality/strong/, s/fairly/_fairly_/

23:28 <mfiano> I think I appreciate that most about Racket. It is one of very few languages with excellent documentation.

23:29 <mfiano> I read the complete documentation 7 years ago or so, and dismissed it shortly thereafter due to my investment in Common Lisp, but I'm now re-evaluating it, and likely to re-read the documentation since it's been so long.

23:33 <vraid> there's quite a lot of new things since 7 years ago

23:34 <mfiano> I can imagine. That's a software eternity.

23:37 <mfiano> I am definitely no stranger to Lisp, but I'm sure I'll have lots of questions while reading the documentation, having never even worked with its Scheme inspiration.