Not too mention the basics, eye opening approaches to XML and Web, an IDE, debugger, contracts, typed/dynamic language, jit, Android development, ... and on and on.
The talent of the core PLT group is outstanding. Matthias Felleisen for example was awarded an ACM Fellowship in 2006 for contributions to programming languages and development environments. His academic publications are right up there with the best out there, yet he spends as much time focused on the foundational aspects of teaching kids, and students as high brow papers, and the real world demands of programming. And the rest the core are not too shabby either.
IMHO, there are currently only 2 top tier active hotspots where the cool theoretical meets with the practical and usable in programming language theory, the Haskell and PLT ecospheres.
Scala, and Closure would be next.
Don't listen to the wingnuts comedy central wannabe's cracking poor puns here about schemes and rackets (well laugh at the good ones).
In all seriousness, if you are at that point where you've stumbled onto the fact that there is a whole world beyond Java, Cobol, C and C++ and are having fun exploring Smalltalk, SML, OCaml, Haskell, Scala, Closure et al, do not skip, repeat, do not skip exploring PLT Racket. It is as rich, and deep and mind altering as any of them.
It was a joking reference to the Parrot announcement, which started as an April Fool's joke about a merger of Perl and Python but which led to the Parrot VM (the One VM to Rule Them All).
Sounds like a great idea. My understanding is that PLT Scheme goes way beyond R5 (even R6), and with the new "R7" dual standard on the way, better to change the name now rather than later and be potentially confused with the upcoming R7 "big" Scheme.
You are. They already have a dialect of Scheme that contains many extensions beyond the RxRS specs, this is just giving it a name so that people stop confusing "PLT's dialect of Scheme" with "Scheme in general".
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the name "Racket", because it makes me think of tennis rather than racketeering. However, I do support the idea of having a PLT "brand" rather than a hodgepodge of names like DrScheme, MrEd and mzscheme.
Makes sense, but I'm not sure I like the way it's headed. Scheme is so named due to a Lisp system called Planner. "Scheme" and "Planner" (and, I suppose, "Gambit") have mostly neutral connotations. "Swindle", "Larceny", "Heist", and now "Racket" are obviously criminal.
It's not a good direction, PR-wise. You end up with people having to justify to their bosses why they want to use something called Racket for work, or justifying to parents why their kids are learning Racket in schools.
(And then there's the inevitable analogy: Python : Pythonista :: Racket : Racketeer)
You end up with people having to justify to their bosses why they want to use something called Racket for work, or justifying to parents why their kids are learning Racket in schools.
I've been using Clojure a lot and have been lamenting the fact that Clojure, while great for building applications isn't great for shell scripting. Racket may be just the tool I reach for when I can't write it in Clojure.
2010 looks like it's going to be a great year for Lisp.
Kind of like naming something with the word "hacker", it could be something good or something bad. The "News" bit of "Hacker News" adds context that makes it seem legit, even if you initially take "Hacker" as something negative. There is no implicit context for "PLT Racket". Just my $.02, but it's not a good choice of names.
Old executables, web sites, mailing addresses, and module names will forward to the new ones. We will work to make the transition as painless as possible and to preserve old references for as long as possible.
Strange name change, but a good programming environment (although I more frequently use Emacs+Gambit-C Scheme because I like being able to effortlessly build small compiled applications - harder to do in PLT Scheme).
There used to be several paragraphs, e.g. explaining the choice of name, but it's been taken down. I guess this wasn't the launch they were hoping for.
PLT Racket is as evolved beyond standard Scheme as modern man from Australopithecus.
So many rich areas of study are available for exploration. Just some of the capabilities, not toy, but full robust capabilities, include:
- Lazy - Functional - Reactive - OO - Macros (powerful, hygenic) - Delimited continuations - Module system (dynamic)
Not too mention the basics, eye opening approaches to XML and Web, an IDE, debugger, contracts, typed/dynamic language, jit, Android development, ... and on and on.
The talent of the core PLT group is outstanding. Matthias Felleisen for example was awarded an ACM Fellowship in 2006 for contributions to programming languages and development environments. His academic publications are right up there with the best out there, yet he spends as much time focused on the foundational aspects of teaching kids, and students as high brow papers, and the real world demands of programming. And the rest the core are not too shabby either.
IMHO, there are currently only 2 top tier active hotspots where the cool theoretical meets with the practical and usable in programming language theory, the Haskell and PLT ecospheres.
Scala, and Closure would be next.
Don't listen to the wingnuts comedy central wannabe's cracking poor puns here about schemes and rackets (well laugh at the good ones).
In all seriousness, if you are at that point where you've stumbled onto the fact that there is a whole world beyond Java, Cobol, C and C++ and are having fun exploring Smalltalk, SML, OCaml, Haskell, Scala, Closure et al, do not skip, repeat, do not skip exploring PLT Racket. It is as rich, and deep and mind altering as any of them.