Why Racket? Why Lisp?

[Brian Adkins]

I just read this article from Matthew Butterick about why lisp in general, and Racket specifically has been a great choice for him:

http://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html

Some excerpts:

"Thus, be­fore I em­barked on my Lisp ad­ven­ture, I wanted to un­der­stand the costs & ben­e­fits of us­ing a Lisp. Why do Lisps have such a great rep­u­ta­tion, but so few users? Was I see­ing some­thing every­one else missed? Or did they know some­thing I didn’t? "

"What I found was plenty of Lisp flat­tery from ex­pert Lisp pro­gram­mers. (Also plenty of Lisp kvetch­ery from its de­trac­tors.) What I didn’t find were sim­ple, per­sua­sive ar­gu­ments in its fa­vor. So here’s why Racket was the right tool for this project, and what I see as the prac­ti­cal virtues of Lisps in general."

"Yet de­spite my flaws as a pro­gram­mer, with Racket I’ve been able to ren­der big­ger ideas into pro­grams more quickly, and with fewer bugs, than any lan­guage I’ve used be­fore (and there have been many—Ba­sic, C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Python, and oth­ers). "

Brian

[Pedro Pinto]

I had some experience with Racket as well and I agree on the speed issue, i.e. once you are familiar with the environment it is very fun and quick to bring new ideas to live. At least for small programs. I am not sure about bigger code bases, say >100KLOCs. I think I would miss static typing. Does anyone have experience with large, dynamically typed code bases worked on by multiple programmers? Don't you miss the static checks and refactoring tools?

-pp

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