> In The Amazing Digital Circus (episode 8, "hjsakldfhl"), when Kinger opens the terminal to try to reset Caine, you can see that Caine (a creative AI built in 1996) is programmed in Lisp. The file is literally named Caine-core.lisp.
Nice touch. Explains how Caine returns in episode 9: Lisp continuations allow for graceful error recovery.
wasn't Caine written in common lisp? Pretty sure they show that the debugger they used in the command line was gdb (which ... is that even actually possible?)
It is rich with information, to the point, and presented in a way that a motivated and competent reader can immediately know something about and be useful with racket. That’s how it was for me anyways; someone who didn’t know anything about racket before reading through this.
Wtf kind of intro to a programming language doesn’t include syntax rules? We are all informed, experienced, technologically inclined people here. Not dumb children.
I’m struggling to see your comment as anything more than contrarian babble.
When I see "friendly introduction," I don't expect to see a deadhead sticker front and center. But I guess if you're an actual Deadhead it's not that startling. ;-)
While the language is interesting, sadly, nobody is using it in the wild. Maybe due to cumbersome deployment options? The ability to produce native standalone executables would boost its usage I believe.
I agree. In 2020 we had to manipulate some Moodle files. I wrote the code in Racket and I sent the ".exe" file to my coworkers, that never knew they were using Racket.
any time the topic of racket comes up, i wonder if there are any interesting apps i could explore. but all i find is libraries and dev tools: https://awesome-racket.com/
What makes this a desirable feature? From the perspective where local reasoning is the most desirable property a language can have, how does homoiconicity support that?
I honestly am curious. I've seen a few examples presented for it, but they always seem like bad software engineering to me. Where's an example that does something in a cleaner way than alternatives present in other languages while remaining compatible with local reasoning?
> From the perspective where local reasoning is the most desirable property a language can have
That's a perspective. If you're looking for a low-level language, then Scheme isn't it. (Forget iconicity - Scheme is garbage-collected. And supports continuations!)
If you don't program in machine code - which would maximize local reasoning - then you must know the language with the perfect balance of local reasoning and higher-level constructs. Knowing which language that is would add specificity to the discussion...
it allows you to create a language that compiles to your original language.
You can abstract everything away. Not like Haskell where laziness accounts for some and typeclasses for some (and often an exponential growth in compile times). No, it property let's you change the language.
This doesn't strike me as better than the alternatives. In Haskell, it's just a few different functions to handle the different use cases. That strikes me as far better than one "function" that magically does different things depending on how it's called. It is local, I'll give you that. But it still seems bad because you have overloaded the semantics along multiple axes simultaneously. I prefer building blocks with only a single set of semantics each. I believe it's better to write precise code than DWIM code.
Nice touch. Explains how Caine returns in episode 9: Lisp continuations allow for graceful error recovery.
When an introduction says “friendly”, I don’t expect it to assume that I know what lambda is.
When an introduction says “friendly”, I don’t expect syntax rules to appear in it. At all.
Wtf kind of intro to a programming language doesn’t include syntax rules? We are all informed, experienced, technologically inclined people here. Not dumb children.
I’m struggling to see your comment as anything more than contrarian babble.
You can read the about it here: https://defn.io/2020/01/04/remember-internals/
I honestly am curious. I've seen a few examples presented for it, but they always seem like bad software engineering to me. Where's an example that does something in a cleaner way than alternatives present in other languages while remaining compatible with local reasoning?
That's a perspective. If you're looking for a low-level language, then Scheme isn't it. (Forget iconicity - Scheme is garbage-collected. And supports continuations!)
If you don't program in machine code - which would maximize local reasoning - then you must know the language with the perfect balance of local reasoning and higher-level constructs. Knowing which language that is would add specificity to the discussion...
You can abstract everything away. Not like Haskell where laziness accounts for some and typeclasses for some (and often an exponential growth in compile times). No, it property let's you change the language.
I got tired of loops sucking and made this, for example: https://rikspucko.koketteriet.se/bjoli/goof-loop