7 hours ago, Sean McBeth wrote: > I had some thoughts today about Racket and apparent influences it > has had on Processing (and by extension Arduino). I'd be interested > to hear what the Racket community itself thinks of Processing and > the sorts of things people do with it, in comparison to Racket. > > http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/51904590190/processing-and-racket
Some random comments (keeping Matthias's comments in mind, so I try to not repeat them): * When you talk about the visual design of the web pages, there are actually two different things that play together here, and they are also coming from very different pieces of code. (Yes, this whole point is pretty much a technicality, but it's rare to find people who pay a lot of attention to it...) The first is the actual *web* pages which are built in a more or less traditional way that spits out HTML directly. Here there were some suggestions to improve the contents a few times, but nobody made a more serious attempt, yet. But really, the main point is that anything can be done, provided it fulfills the basic requirements of being useful enough, clear enough, appealing enough, informative enough, and get most people to want to switch to it. (And BTW, *many* completely tiny aspects of the web page have been thoroughly discussed...) The second system is the documentation -- which is what you see in the example in your snapshot. The thing here is that you want some way to render documentation so it can fit in both HTML and PDF and whatever else -- which makes the kind of rendering much more restricted. There's not much that can be done at the rendering level without substantial effort, but probably some improvements can be done at the CSS level. As a side-note, the actual contents that you see on the web is a weird combination of the two: taking the usual web page templates and slapping it on the documentation pages (which originally look like the locally-installed documentation that you see in your Racket installation). * "Make more dynamic examples for beginners". IMO, this is not a good title for what you seem to be saying... It's not the dynamism, or the beginner-ism that is important in what you're saying. If it was, then I think that we have a ton of them, and more are being made every day... (See for example the rosettacode thing (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Racket) which is becoming a nice repository for lots of such examples, at varying levels.) Instead, I think that your main point is about the presentation of the examples -- the Processing page that you point to is very obviously visual. It's actually visual enough to make me suspect that it's covering a shallow language since it tries so hard to make cute examples instead of focusing on contents. Given that the visual appeal is so important for you, I think that the "Quick" tutorial was probably something that looks misguided: it uses visuals as a way to introduce the language, but the visuals themselves are just demonstrations of things you can do with a language, and not a goal in their own appeal-ability. But I don't think that there's any reason to choose either this approach or that approach. If the Processing thing works well for visual people, then it's most definitely worth trying. And it seems like an itch that suits you well, so you could just as well start doing that kind of a page and see how it works. We can figure out later a way to link it into the rest of the pages to make it stand out: I think that there's certainly a place for more "quick try it out" resources that we can point to in the "getting started" page, and this would fit nicely with other such entry points. * Even more specifically, I think that it's wrong to compare Racket's package page (both the new one and the planet one) to the Processing "exhibition" page: the package pages that we have are mostly about libraries that you can use to make stuff up, so it's not like an exhibition page that demonstrates full applications -- ones that can be used not only as temptation points, but as templates for people to just take the source and try to tweak things and play with an existing thing rather than go build something up from scratch. But again, this is not to avoid your implicit criticism: I just take it as a call for making up such an exhibition page. BTW, I don't think that this must be something that is inherently tied up to things that are purely visual -- the same approach can be taken with more CS-ish contents. For example, I think that Danny's brainfuck tutorial and Matthew's scratchy toy are good candidates for such a thing, even when neither of them is particularly graphic. * Finally, I notice that in the HN thread that you made someone pointed to this thing: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/all/ and I really think that something like that would be very nice to have. I think that it falls somewhere between the "real documentation" and an "exhibition" pages -- more like a collection of impressive examples and a way to quickly play with them, even when the visual and instant feedback are probably not helping the CS aspect of learning a language... -- ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life! ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
