I think you make valid points, I just wanted to provide an alternate opinion...
On Sun, 14 Jul 2019 at 13:44 -0400, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote: > - The challenge with s-expressions is largely in anxiety with something > that looks extremely alien. I suspect there's more fear from > instructors than students in encountering a lisp syntax; my > experience is that introducing someone who doesn't know differently > to a parenthetical syntax isn't scary for them, and they tend to like > it. But people who have *started out* with experience in a non-lispy > language tend to find it scary. On the contrary, there are plenty of other languages to choose from for non-SE syntax, including many which have been successfully used as a teaching language (Python, Java, ...). Yes, some people use Racket as a teaching language. But given Racket's position in the languages ecosystem, instructors probably come to Racket due to it's unfamiliar syntax... > > - Nonetheless, assumptions that various math operators should be infix > is understandable because that's what people see today. One of my gripes from writing and reading (reviewing) C code on a daily basis is that I have a hard time remembering the precedence of the operators beyond PEMDAS. Things get murky when trying to figure out the order of the other operators. And as soon as you start allowing infix, you better allow extending it, for better or worse. > - I am indeed very for growth in the community, though my main interest > in growth is in seeing a wider diversity of participants than just > raw numbers. Obviously other peoples' mileage may vary. At what point are you still growing Racket instead of some other (new) language. Do we really need another Python? -- Jack M. Rosenthal http://jack.rosenth.al That code? Must have been the last guy... -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/20190715122220.GA4069%40rosenth.al. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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