Racket frustrates me – Winny’s Weblog
Revealed: Friday, Jun 16, 2023
(8580090)
Sorry if I upset any of the great Racket people on the market.
It’s time for slightly actuality verify. First, repeat after me:
Coding is a device to get stuff accomplished. When you let your programming language
influence your productiveness, you aren’t in cost, the know-how is looking the
pictures.
§Why would I take advantage of Racket at this time?
Do I wish to iterate each 18 hours ready for the pkgs.racket-lang.org construct
server to complete constructing my package deal? Then do it once more as a result of the construct
failed (my mistake, however now my customers have to attend till later that week…)?
Do I wish to fear about packaging and deploying Racket code or might I merely
do the identical in most different languages with none fuss? I attempted packaging Racket
in Nix, it didn’t go effectively.
Do I wish to make investments belief in a programming platform that considers umask of
optional importance?
Do I wish to power customers to undertake an software written in a language that
makes use of on the very least 122M resident reminiscence on my workstation? Or do I
contemplate Python or Guile which each use lower than 10M?
Do I wish to power customers to package deal Racket which itself has no clear custody of
its construct inputs – are you able to produce a Racket tarball your self that’s precisely
just like the one on the discharge web site? Who is aware of what’s in these tarballs!
Do I wish to spend money on a neighborhood and not using a mechanism to use neighborhood
suggestions constructively? RFCs?
Do I wish to write 4x the code (in Racket) as a result of I forgot my secret transfer was
truly all of the pypi packages that I took as a right in Python?
Do I wish to surprise about what was meant by “contributions welcome” when most
of the core racket codebases at greatest have a README, at worst don’t have any
contributor documentation?
Do I wish to spend money on a platform the place management is constructing Rombus
a.ok.a. Racket2 as an alternative of specializing in making core Racket simply that a lot better
and simpler to undertake?
(see additionally: Future of Racket.)
Do I wish to wait 10+ minutes for my package deal to construct in CI as a result of another
package deal maintainer determined to tug in racket or racket-doc (which pulls in
your complete massive Racket distribution)?
Do I wish to ship multi-gigabyte docker pictures due to the above kitchen sink package deal?
Do I wish to cope with being blocked because of not understanding how one can use the
much less understood options of racket resembling continuations,
syntax-parse/syntax-case macros, units/signatures? You’ll wish to find out about
all these items to write down efficient Racket code.
Do I wish to add enterprise danger by writing a product in Racket? Does anyone
work as an trade Racket coder in any respect? Would I wrestle to rent extra expertise?
Do I…. yeah there’s extra however let’s transfer on 😉
§No I don’t wish to make investments extra time in Racket
This put up took ceaselessly to write down. I’m giving up a portion of myself (and
permitting for extra development) by giving up Racket. My preliminary premise was that
Racket might substitute Python in my workflows. For a time that appeared to work.
However then the true laborious truths began to seem. I used to be shedding loads of
productiveness. The productiveness losses have been incremental however actually slowed
down my velocity considerably during the last seven years. Certain the language
has loads of fantastic options, however there’s extra to a great programming
language than effectively, its programming language.
I additionally believed I might make a profession out of utilizing or supporting software program
associated to or written in Racket. I feel this was a bit too formidable from my
perspective. The place did the racket-money mailing listing go? Or actually all of the
manufacturing customers? I solely discovered one manufacturing person.
So lengthy and thanks for all the usual fish.
Peace ????.
§P.S. racket.wiki
I’m making a gift of the racket.wiki area. In order for you it and have a Gandi account,
I’ll switch it to you. Contact info on my home page. Racket leaders, please
contemplate taking this area so I don’t find yourself giving it to a whole rando.