Neil Van Dyke
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to Racket Users
You can find various Scheme code around the Internet, and various
textbooks that use Scheme (sometimes with the code available for download).
The Racket code for much of core Racket itself is also available, and
some of it will probably be installed already, though it's mostly not
written as beginner tutorials. (It represents particular styles, and
can also get pretty obtuse, so grepping for how to do, say, GUI tabs,
might not be very helpful.) The first bundled code that comes to mind
as possibly helpful might be on your system under
"share/racket/pkgs/games/" (or something like that).
There are some good tutorials that people have written as blog posts and
Racket manuals.
I agree that a set of code written specifically as "load these in
Racket" tutorials would be useful for people who like to get started
that way. (Perhaps as "notebooks".) I don't recall much of that
specifically for Racket, but I've seen it for some other languages and
frameworks/libraries.
A long time ago, there was a "Scheme Cookbook", IIRC, started by Noel
Welsh, et al.(?), which emphasized what's now called Racket, but which
seems to have disappeared. It wasn't strictly tutorial of the language,
but was perhaps inspired by a cookbook for Perl, and showed ways to
accomplish tasks thought to be commonplace, which often meant runnable
code samples, and one could learn some things just by reading those.
Aside, before I encourage people to work on all the above... We already
have so many piles and piles and manuals and other trappings of big,
popular platforms, wildly disproportionate to how much actual people and
real-world uses we have. I keep thinking of additional ways to promote
Racket, but I don't want to inadvertently be "playing house". I
currently think that one of the most important things we're missing, at
least for the goal of practical use promotion, is more actual deployed
real-world success stories, probably from startups. There's already
more than enough ways to learn Scheme and Racket sufficiently, to deploy
real-world systems. If someone is up to doing such a startup: find a
startup CEO who can get funding, start coding with the copious
information and community support available for Racket... and then feed
back your success story, as well as feed back useful generic open source
modules you'll probably have to write to get to launch. (And if you can
get enough funding for that startup, I could help with everything except
the funding&sales schmoozing.)
Of course, if one wants to make, say, tutorials, that's great, and they
should. But if they're starting with the goal of wanting to do big
things in Racket, or wanting to have other people do big things in
Racket for some reason, then making tutorials might not be the most
effective way to achieve that.
(A humanities professor friend says that one of the biggest things she
has to teach enthusiastic, woke new undergraduates is that they can't
simply write to "raise awareness". IIUC, she has them start with issues
they care about, research and understand the issues objectively, learn
about the structures in which changes they want can happen, and only
then effectively communicate, to make actual progress, based on all that
understanding. I can't claim to know how for certain how to do this for
some of the more popular goals of Racket people, including my own goals
for Racket, but I'll try to keep that wisdom from outside STEM in mind.)