Has anyone written a guide for someone familiar with Clojure to get up to speed quickly with Racket?
If not, I'd be willing to collaborate on writing one, if you'd be willing to spend a day or two showing me how to do things in Racket. Here's why I'm asking. I wrote a bunch of code in Clojure for a project that's heavy on graphs, expecting that the GUI would be easy because Clojure provides access to the Java ecosystem without getting mired in Java. I ran into several obstacles with Clojure, one of which was that the support for writing a GUI is actually pretty sketchy. I just looked a bit at switching to Racket, and so far it looks excellent: debugging (wow!), documentation (wow!), and what appears to be a truly great GUI library. In particular, the pasteboard% class looks like it might fulfill most of my needs very simply. As excellent as the documentation is, there are a number of probably very low-level, practical matters that I haven't been able to infer quickly. Here's a sample of the sort of things that are puzzling me. Most could probably be sorted out in a few minutes: In Clojure, the data structures of first resort are map and vector. What's the equivalent in Racket--the short list of bread-and-butter data structures that you reach for first when writing production code? How do you, say, accumulate a sequence of items, like conj'ing to a vector in Clojure? Do you usually do nested data structures in Racket, or do you normally keep them flat, as in Python? (Here's one that I figured out, but it took me a whole day.) What's the syntax for 'augment'? (The answer, I think: You're not supposed to explicitly write 'augment'. Instead, you invoke the 'mixin' macro and pass it 'define/augment'.) How do you print stuff in the REPL so you can see what's in it? For example, if I print a graph in DrRacket, all I see is this: #<unweighted-graph> How do you extract the graph held in a graph-pasteboard<%> object? How would you link the graphs in the Generic Graph Library to a graph-pasteboard<%>? And isn't there a pure-functional graph data structure? How do you attach data to the nodes and edges in a graph? Just to clarify, I'm not looking for a point-by-point comparison of Clojure vs. Racket, or a library like rackjure that provides Clojure-like syntax in Racket, or anything "pedagogical", high-level, or theoretical. I just want to find out some basics about how you actually get things done in Racket, explained briefly for someone with prior experience with Clojure. Ben -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
