My thoughts are in the thread you linked to:
https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues/105#issuecomment-521446706
"""
I see Racket2 through the rubric of "We almost never break backwards
compatible and insist on gradual evolution as the only way to make
progress; but, now we are willing to make some radical changes: What
can we do to make Racket drastically better that can't be expressed as
an evolution?" In other words, I feel like Racket2 is defined as the
goal, "Whatever makes Racket a lot better" and the design constraint,
"It's okay to be incompatible."
"""
When it comes specifically to syntax, which is what you seem to be
asking about by reading the quote, here's a quote from my attempts to
write this up before:
https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/pull/109/files#diff-f609e36bab3cb71c8829f58a5f9b2455R16
"""
The uniformity of S-expressions limits the amount of information at
the notational level of reading Racket programs. A small amount of
extra notation can go a long way with a small number of mores on its
use. For example, in Racket brackets are used in S-expressions when no
function or macro application is implied (like in the cases of a
`cond`); reading Racket programs without this notational affordance is
more difficult. On the other hand, it is awkward to embed arbitrary
fragments of code not in S-expression format, such as when quoting a
program in another language. The only effective option is to embed a
string. The Racket @-reader is helpful at this, but it is not
uniformly available and the standard structure of Racket's
S-expression based languages do not allow macro-specific reading of
such syntaxes.
"""
I'll add that I see S-expressions as obviously limited and it would be
nice to make a more powerful syntactic extension system that does not
say, "You can have anything you want, provided it is a parenthesis."
So for me, I don't see the syntax mission as having anything to do
with students or getting people to like me, I see it as a way to go
beyond the limitations of S-expressions and do something more powerful
and interesting. I think people will like us more after in as much as
I think people like awesome things, and I want to make something
awesome.
Jay
--
Jay McCarthy
Associate Professor @ CS @ UMass Lowell
http://jeapostrophe.github.io
Vincit qui se vincit.
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