Racket is not Common Lisp which is what Roswell is built for, so why bring it up here?
I've used Racket ever since it was called PLT Scheme but I've moved on to Common Lisp for the past 5 years, once I realized that there is basically nothing that Racket does better than CL, and a lot that it does worse, interactive development being the most important.
SBCL being 2-4x faster without declarations or special optimization passes (in my own code I could get 10x the
speed of Racket by doing declaration passes) is also immensely useful.
Not to mention, the thriving ecosystem around Common Lisp.
Quicklisp has helped with the explosion of popularity and there are well-maintained good libraries for the vast majority of tasks one would like to do. Most of these libraries are also portable across CL implementations which is something one doesn't see in Scheme-land (besides the lack of libraries to begin with).
Amen. People don't quite understand how resilient and nasty the Islam language virus is. They're projecting their own religious points of view to these primitive savages.
I'm chinese and was mostly referring to my country. I know there are places like Japan and maybe as you said India where this does not apply.
EDIT:
It's also funny that you mentioned the spiritual angle.
I've studied Advaita for many years (and still practice it) and there is something to be said about the various holy men who practice it. In the case of Nisargadatta, for instance, he had a wife and kids that he immediately abandoned once he met sri sadguru sidarameshwar maharaj and fully commited to that path.
If you read his books (highly recommended) you will discover a man that lives in absolute bliss. It's like a huge weight has been lifted off of his shoulders, and I don't just mean his family (more like the burden of having to interact with society at large).
It's interesting to me how this is "accepted" in India but a person acting in exactly the same ways minus the spiritual angle is treated far differently. If that is not social conditioning I don't know what is.
Don't assume things about me (this is another tendency that "people" have :-)
From an early age, I found contemporary "people" uninteresting to extremely dull. I had to force myself to socialize with them in order not to become a premature social pariah. It's a lot easier these days.
I'm mostly talking about your average human by the way, not the sum total of humanity.
To give you an example, I enjoy Nietzsche's (another social pariah) writing enormously but I find Nietzsche-the-person mostly uninteresting and boring. This is the outlook I have on life. I'd rather spend my time reading all the treasures we have from the past and trying to understand them, than indulge in pointless socializing.
I don't see myself as weird or crazy. I think I'm simply way ahead of the curve here. Give it 30-40-60 years, human relationships will have degenerated to a degree that far surpasses mine.
When robots can fulfill your every "human" desire (food, sex, companionship) and you are free to do whatever you want with the rest of your time are you going to keep wasting this precious commodity in pursuit of other, "human" relationships or will you finally be able to fully devote yourself to whatever it is that you know, deep down, is your true calling in life?
This is of course assuming that your true calling in life is not "other people" or in other words, current social conditioning or consensus reality. This is when that conditioning will fully break down and society will have advanced a step on the evolutionary ladder.
Amazing piece of logic here, "you came out of people -> you depend on people" and "you must like people" is implied.
I hate that I have to depend on people. I find them unreliable at best. Which is why a lot of us are working to improve the primitive societies we currently live in in order to REMOVE that dependency. I'd rather depend on algorithms (and in fact I do, more and more every single day that passes) than anything as primitive as people.
We need to use the time we have in order to do the things that are important to us, not to enrich "others" whoever they may be. This obsession about society and socializing and following norms and "fitting in" is one of the things that are seriously fucked up in the western world.
We need more people who have gone sideways, more recluses, more geniuses, more people who do not fit in and do things their own way. Otherwise what's the point?
I understand that this may sound alien or maybe crazy to people who have grown up in western societies and therefore been indoctrinated to an extreme degree to seek the approval of others and so on, but that's all there is to it really, social conditioning. Nobody will remember you 200 years after you die, you better use the time you have to do something meaningful with your life and to me that does not include idle socializing so that some sacks of blood, meat and bone will "feel" sad when you're gone.
I never understood this stigma about hermits/social isolation in western societies. In the east, it's much more accepted.
Reading this piece I got the impression that the writer and persons interviewed were HORRIFIED by what they discovered.
It seemed to me as if "having friends" was pretty fucking high in their list-of-important-things-in-life.
I was very amused by this, almost started laughing in fact.
Human relationships are not for everyone I'd say, in fact there are many healthy people that view them as pointless waste of time at best.
Technology will solve this little problem once and for all, in this century. I won't go as far as AGI but when house keeping robots become ubiquitous which is surely less than 20 years down the road, society at large will have to evolve and primitive points of view as described in this nytimes piece will basically disappear.
Well odds are there exists something relevant, but it probably falls under "quantum mysticism" or other such quackery (e.g. transcendental meditation has actual scientists backing it but you gotta pay 1000$ for the privilege and it's really a cult). Science and mysticism/philosophy don't really mix.
When you're doing meditation, especially no-mind meditation, physical processes are irrelevant, indeed the entire world is irrelevant. Looking for explanations or theories or systems in the scientific way is, on one hand, hard/impossible due to subjectivity and on the other, goes against the entire practice since you're inventing even more dualities and thought constructs when you should be tearing everything down!
The idea here (that one gradually slips into with meditation or other mystical systems) is that there is no "You". Happy, sad, You, other people, all these "things" don't really exist, they're all illusions, mind constructs, artificial.
Once you see the world for what it really is (a dream), all the masks fall away and you're free to go on with your "life" unencumbered by artificial thought creations that another artificial thought creation ("You") thought were real.
If it's peace you want, you really should look into Advaita Vedanta.
Happiness/sadness is but another duality. There is no peace in duality. Once you understand (as you seem to) that one can find no lasting peace in ephemeral things (money, status, physical pleasures) it's a natural progression to throw all the dualities away and seek the source, Brahman, the ultimate reality, formless, changeless. Of course given the extent of most people's social conditioning these days, it's easier said than done but anyone can do it.
Unfortunately, modern smalltalk environments (pharo, squeak) are terrible compared to modern Common Lisp implementations.
The libraries are not there, monticello doesn't even support HTTPS last I checked, nevermind cryptographic signatures, they don't support concurrency via native OS threads, the FFIs are a joke (just take a look at pharo), the graphical environments are laughable (pharo and squeak look like total crap on OSX retina machines, the font rendering gives you headaches, yes it's THAT bad), performance is abysmal, I could go on for ages...
Common Lisp on the other hand has multiple mature opensource native code compilers (SBCL and CCL) that support multiple platforms, concurrency via OS threads, have amazing foreign function interfaces, performance that is close to C, optional paid support for the opensource implementations, a development environment that is more traditional but also lets you program 100% interactively from within the image without compromising when it comes to interfacing with traditional version control, also support snapshots and so on.
Smalltalk is more "dynamic" than Common Lisp and is also better (in theory)
when it comes to interactive development. But in practice, Pharo and Squeak are stuck in the 90s at best and compromise in areas that today are of paramount importance. Common Lisp doesn't and gives you all the options.
Unfortunately, and this goes for pretty much every UNIX out there with hardened (grsec) linux as possible exception, not just OSX, once someone has a local user on your machine, it's trivial to get root. On OSX, you don't even need a local privilege escalation exploit, so many other ways based on the way subsystems interact together.
If you want robust security, you will need to forget about OSX/BSD/Linux and look at Qubes OS. It's the best we have right now and nothing else comes close. Alternatively, compartmentalize and segregate (at the hardware level, all virtual machines have tons of host escalation bugs) and accept the fact that you will get owned.
(As others have mentioned), it's closed source, so who is going to trust it with personal data? I'd much rather trust bittorrent sync than this but this point is really irrelevant. This isn't mom and pop software.
On the other hand, those who would like to use it seriously (pirates, hackers, those who value privacy) will laugh at it,
not only because it's closed source and thus all claims the author makes are unverifiable, but also because the architecture is crap.
So, summarizing, is there anything of substance besides hype and famewhoring here? I think not.
I've used Racket ever since it was called PLT Scheme but I've moved on to Common Lisp for the past 5 years, once I realized that there is basically nothing that Racket does better than CL, and a lot that it does worse, interactive development being the most important.
SBCL being 2-4x faster without declarations or special optimization passes (in my own code I could get 10x the speed of Racket by doing declaration passes) is also immensely useful.
Not to mention, the thriving ecosystem around Common Lisp. Quicklisp has helped with the explosion of popularity and there are well-maintained good libraries for the vast majority of tasks one would like to do. Most of these libraries are also portable across CL implementations which is something one doesn't see in Scheme-land (besides the lack of libraries to begin with).