I do a substantial amount of coding in Racket, including maintaining the Herbie numerical compiler (https://herbie.uwplse.org/) over the last decade.
Racket is great! The runtime is reasonably fast, and the standard library is exceptionally featureful, including, for example, a decent plotting library, an HTTP server, decent HTML and JSON support, several forms of multi-threading, and a quite good FFI, all of which Herbie uses extensively. I suppose the parentheses are a question of taste (I like them!) but a lot of the specific syntactic decisions, like the `for` and `match` macros, are quite nice.
Is Racket the Lisp where I wanted to write keywords like `foo:` or `:foo`, but they went with something like `'#:foo`, which ruined keyword syntax for me?
Fear not, you can make `#%top` and `#:app` rewrite `foo:` to `#:foo`.
FWIW choosing `#:foo` over, say, `foo:` was due to backwards compatibility.
In Scheme and Racket `foo:` is a legal identifier, so there might have been programs that stopped working, if `foo:` suddenly was a keyword.
I don't know about Racket, but I do know Guile does that and I kind of prefer it as a way to reduce syntax (because the number sign is syntax already for most Lisps as the marker for a vector, and it's also used to bring functions into the symbol namespace in a Lisp-2) by freeing the colon.
Do they do something neat with the colon? I do prefer the shorter keyword syntax, at least in Clojure because of how common they are.
Clojure tends to use them very heavily though, and last I looked it seemed like Racket used more lists (as a matter of community preference, not forced by the language).
I have heard so many bas thing about Racket, all the bullying of the core team and being really bad people in general. Each time I like to give it a shot I remember this and just walk away.
Racket is made by academics. Academics piss on each other a lot, it's unfortanately part of the culture and has (historically) been rewarded in the system (I am a PhD candidate, FWIW, and so have many, many friends "in the system").
If you're going to get excited about academics being pissy and condescending to their rivals, you're going to eliminate an awful lot of useful things from your life when you peek behind the curtain at the conversations between the makers.
Personally, I find academic pissing matches far, far less offensive than the self-agrandizing bullshitting we find in industry. Look hard enough, and there are people being at least occasional jerks everywhere.
What? I know what you're taking about but it's literally only 1 dude(Matthias vs Butterick) who has chilled down for the most part Everyone else is fine. Do you have the source for others being toxic?
I have never heard of this. Not saying it doesn't exist, I don't know what it's like to get involved as a maintainer, but as a regular user just asking questions on the mailing list, I never received any abuse.
Racket is great! The runtime is reasonably fast, and the standard library is exceptionally featureful, including, for example, a decent plotting library, an HTTP server, decent HTML and JSON support, several forms of multi-threading, and a quite good FFI, all of which Herbie uses extensively. I suppose the parentheses are a question of taste (I like them!) but a lot of the specific syntactic decisions, like the `for` and `match` macros, are quite nice.
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