These are great points to make to the wider community. Keep spreading them. As I am reading published books on other scripting languages (say Clojure), I am beginning to see that it's all about having a PL Kitsch [*] literature in your eco-system. And it has to start from just such stories, told over and over to various groups. -- Matthias
[*] Kitsch literature is easily recognizable by overuse of positive adjectives and adverbs. As many of you know, it is the most widely sold and read form of literature, and I am making this statement here not in the American sense of the word (art objects in bad taste) but the Germanic reference to a genre of writing (also bad for people who like to think). On Feb 16, 2012, at 7:46 PM, Harry Spier wrote: > > To give some relatively trivial examples (but the kind of thing > developers in the real world do all the time): > > In Python to access the Win32 api you need to install the third party > package win32api and for each update of Python a new version of > win32api is needed. In Racket you simply have the "system" command or > for my needs the "shell-execute" command. No third party package is > required and there are no issues when Racket goes to the next version. > > In Ruby to interface to imagemagick I needed to install a Ruby gem > Rmagick which is Ruby version specific and then set some environmental > variables. In Racket I just took the old FFI and put the names of the > Imagemagick dlls in it and everything worked like a charm and I'm not > effected when Racket upgrades or imagemagick upgrades (as long as the > name of the dll doesn't change). > > I'm wasting much less time in Racket getting all this background stuff > up and running. > > So to me it seems only a matter of time till programmers discover that > Racket is "programmer and developer friendly" and it becomes > mainstream the way Ruby has (if for no other reason than its so much > faster than Ruby). > > When I tell other programmers that I'm doing my project in Racket I do > get a kind of blank stare back, but it seems to me, that the more > developers say they are developing in Racket, the sooner it will go ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
