Racket is Rodney Dangerfield of languages, an amazing effort in programming language design that gets no respect.
Beyond what others have covered, the new Typed Racket effort is simply amazing and as of yet even hardcore Racketeers have not fully explored it.
It is different and novel type system with a really well thought out syntax notation. The type system has seamless coverage from static type checking which continues into runtime with contracts. It is really novel. In some sense the amalgamation of the best ideas from the "dynamic" typing crowd as well as from the "static" typers.
Second I can't highly recommend enough an alternative development environment using emacs and the most excellent Geiser project for Racket and Guile. It offers a bit of a return to that agile REPL based development feel that some say is missing somewhat with the DrRacket GUI IDE.
Many is the time that I’ve gone to Amazon’s site, clicked on a genre and spent 30 mins working through the top 100 list, which remains fairly static, and wondering where do I go from here. It’s all rather frustrating when Amazon trumpets 15,000 books in some genre but there’s means or mechanism to get at them, no way to dive into the middle of them all and just “browse about”.
As a weekend hobby I’ve been toying around with some way to “deep browse” Amazon book offerings. http://goo.gl/tPPJz I’m very interested in any thoughts on how this is best done. Are carefully curated recommendations by a select and passionate few the right way to go? The current set social book sites seem focus on the “hits” being read by the “masses”. But the deep long tail isn’t being addressed. But how?
Beyond what others have covered, the new Typed Racket effort is simply amazing and as of yet even hardcore Racketeers have not fully explored it.
It is different and novel type system with a really well thought out syntax notation. The type system has seamless coverage from static type checking which continues into runtime with contracts. It is really novel. In some sense the amalgamation of the best ideas from the "dynamic" typing crowd as well as from the "static" typers.
Second I can't highly recommend enough an alternative development environment using emacs and the most excellent Geiser project for Racket and Guile. It offers a bit of a return to that agile REPL based development feel that some say is missing somewhat with the DrRacket GUI IDE.