Jason Stewart wrote on 12/26/18 5:25 PM:
Even for blue-sky projects without any legacy lock-in, I don't fancy
our chances with the enterprise/MIS crowd. They tend to favor
straight-jacket languages, and for good reason!
Agreed. (A big-corporate exception being R&D and "startup-like" units,
not necessarily under MIS, like some might have in, e.g., fintech.)
For some guy running a two-man startup, something like Racket is a
super weapon. For a large organization--with any staff turnaround at
all--metaprogramming is cancer. They need a "paper trail" for the
next guy to follow.
Them's fightin' words. :) For a counterexample, consider a programmer
inheriting a project with an LALR or LR(1) parser written voluminously
by hand, and a programmer inheriting a project instead using a parser
generator DSL. The non-DSL-using code might never be understood enough
to find the bugs or extend it correctly. The new programmer might not
even recognize the model that the non-DSL-using one is supposed to be
implementing, nor stick to a documented model in what changes they do.
And then a third programmer comes along, and then a fourth...
In an organization with good software engineering, judicious use of
DSLs, and having them well-documented, tested, and maintainable, seems a
win.
I think bigger barriers to enterprise adoption of Racket than "I heard
that 'metaprogramming' eats your babies" are:
(1) Wanting employees to be interchangeable cheap commodities.
(2) Wanting someone to blame/sue/consult if anything goes wrong.
I'm happy to let "the enterprise" wait to adopt Racket until after
everyone else has had years of success stories.
I think we agree that startups are a much more likely path for Racket
commercial uptake.
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