Future of Racket
The mailing list traffic on this topic took the wind out of my sails for wanting to spend my tinker time in Racket. On the one hand, it’s probably overreacting for me to throw in the towel on Racket at just the suggestion of this change. On the other hand, part of what makes me interested in writing Racket for projects where I have broad latitude is the sense that I’m both using an exciting technology, and a technology with a history of relative stability.<p>By signaling a switch to some bland surface syntax I feel that it’s eroding the exciting part as well as the stability benefits of the language. For data science (the domain I’m most invested in) Julia has attracted a decent mindshare, is lispy (even if not as much as I want), and is fast. Racket with a bland syntax is likely to be about as lispy as Julia, much slower, and have fewer of the data science libraries I care about.<p>I only have so many hours in my life to dedicate to not-making-money programming endeavors. I was sort of hoping that Racket would be the vehicle for those hours. But right now, I’m worried that Racket is Perl 6-ing itself, and that’s a hard place to spend hours. Especially with people like Greg leaving the community.<p>A while back there was a thread about a prominent member of the Common Lisp community saying that he’d probably eventually leave CL for Racket. But then later he signaled that he’d settled on Gerbil Scheme. Maybe that’s the right life raft from Racket.