Pollen is great. I wish it was more widely used. One of the only reasons I don't use it for most things is that adding the whole of Racket as a dependency comes across as a little much.
One of my "one day..." projects is to try and reimplement a subset of Pollen using https://github.com/racket/zuo which I think would make it much easier to integrate as a much smaller dependency. But maybe the whole "ease of use" budget is blown by using a Lisp in the first place. :)
In any case, if you've ever had to write a technical manual before (or some kind of heavy technical reference), I think you should give Pollen a try. It has much more general answers to a lot of problems you encounter when writing complex web documents. It is an interesting, useful, and pragmatic point in the design space, IMO.
I haven't used Racket much since the CS rewrite, but it's slimmer now, isn't it? I remember Racket feeling a bit chunky when I was using it more, years ago, but I thought part of the rewrite was to address that (among all the other benefits).
You mean the speed, the installation size or the default editor?
The default editor (DrRacket) has a lot of add-ins enabled by default and also support for graphics and debugging. It's possible to disable most of the extensions so it load faster and also disable debugging to make the programs run faster (in exchange of less helpful error messages).
One of my "one day..." projects is to try and reimplement a subset of Pollen using https://github.com/racket/zuo which I think would make it much easier to integrate as a much smaller dependency. But maybe the whole "ease of use" budget is blown by using a Lisp in the first place. :)
In any case, if you've ever had to write a technical manual before (or some kind of heavy technical reference), I think you should give Pollen a try. It has much more general answers to a lot of problems you encounter when writing complex web documents. It is an interesting, useful, and pragmatic point in the design space, IMO.