Cool. I'm always game for a good discussion of DSL's and Lisp (Racket).
But what struck me immediately was the quality of the "Why Lisp Why Racket" essay. This is probably the most compelling that I've seen as it gets specific and cites near-term benefits – not just the elitist "it's good for you" or "it'll make you smarter" stuff. Nicely done.
Thanks for recommending that essay. Reading through it I found myself first agreeing, every other attempt sings about Lisp's wonders without showing you the what/why/how, only woo. Then, here I was halfway through this essay also not yet knowing what the fuzz is about, and when the author finally gets around to it I end up not really sold on it. I have given Racket and CL my time before only to end giving up, not having found "enlightenment" or even the motivation to keep at it. Another day, with more free time I expect I'll give Beautiful Racket also a try.
So glad to see him articulate what I've always felt about x-exprs.
It often gets overlooked because we all understandably want to hype something in a language that's really cool, original, abstract or otherwise reflects well on us. But being able to intuitively, iteratively and rapidly work on XML & HTML files is lush, and the IDE with built-in REPL is just gravy for this purpose.
Even if working on XML and HTML files is boring and a technically solved problem in most languages, it feels better in Racket to me, and the essay did explain why it feels better.
Dunno...I know the style is intentionaly and maybe I'm just not the right target audience for these kinds of essay, but I find this kind of "storytelling" style incredibly longwinded, verbose and actually rather annoying.
It's quite ironic that he needs 24 (in words: twenty-four) paragraphs to get to the first concrete answer to the title question: expressiveness.
Any one using Emacs and tweaking it using elisp might also agree on the "Why Lisp?". In short, everything is an expression in Lisp languages -- Racket, Elisp, .. So one just codes as they think; they don't have to write separate statements to appease the language syntax.
Yes exactly. I already know Racket for academic reasons, but I've been interested in tinkering with DSLs (I've always longed for an embeddable functional programming language that I could have complete non-programmers use to provide simple formulas and conditional logic) so this is right up my alley.
But what struck me immediately was the quality of the "Why Lisp Why Racket" essay. This is probably the most compelling that I've seen as it gets specific and cites near-term benefits – not just the elitist "it's good for you" or "it'll make you smarter" stuff. Nicely done.