Racket News – Issue 31

I would like to see wider adoption of Racket. I spent six weeks earlier this year evaluating and comparing Racket, LispWorks Common Lisp, and Swift for an application [1] I am working on. I ended up not choosing Racket, but it was a very close decision.<p>As a modern Lisp, Racket really has it all: vibrant user and dev community, portable GUI support, easy to make standalone applications, and great libraries.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowledgegraphnavigator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowledgegraphnavigator.com&#x2F;</a>

Interesting[1]:<p>&gt; This library defines disposables, composable first-class producers of values with associated external resources that must be allocated and deallocated such as database connections. Several safe abstractions are provided to consume disposable values while ensuring their associated resources are deallocated after use.<p>Apparently, disposable supplement custodians to work better for cleaning up externally allocated resources. I found the concept of custodians powerful, but not <i>quite</i> powerful enough, so it&#x27;s good to see some work done in this area.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;disposable&#x2F;Basic_Disposable_API_and_Concepts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;disposable&#x2F;Basic_Disposable_API...</a>

A lot of new MIDI packages :p<p><pre><code> rs(src&#x2F;pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. fuzzy-search(src&#x2F;pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket. planning(src&#x2F;pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.</code></pre>

Related: The Racket Stories news aggregator focuses on the Racket programming language, including news such as the original post.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;racket-stories.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;racket-stories.com&#x2F;</a>

Long time ago hygienic macros move me to decide to farewell racket. Common Lisp, clojure or scheme allow me to program in Lisp when I have some code to do. So I don&#x27;t look back to racket. &#x2F;rant<p>Edited: Hygienic macros are powerful but as an user of a computer language and not as a researcher I find them very difficult to grasp compared to Common Lisp macros. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, what is down is that the language is more oriented to researcher than to get things done. Should I work in Northwest University, I would appreciate a lot those complexity and make progress in the field, but that is not my cup of tea now. I don&#x27;t have problems to program in Haskell or any other language, but I don&#x27;t buy racket complexity.

The videos for the &quot;European Lisp Symposium&quot; appear to just be random 30-second clips. Am I missing something?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;elsconf&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;elsconf&#x2F;videos</a>

I really wish that racket had something similar to the c preprocessor&#x27;s #line.