One thing that's still bothering me is the admission that if Racket was already popular enough we wouldn't be considering the syntax change. This was an answer to a question in a live setting, and I am prone to mis-interpreting/understanding, so I very much want to cut Matthew some slack since he only had a few seconds to reply.
I feel framing the purpose (i.e. primarily to gain more users) of Racket2 in this manner is problematic. One reason is that the ultimate end (without some arbitrary limit) seems like it would have to be similar to existing popular languages since that's clearly what more programmers want - exactly how popular do we want to be? Another is that it feels like a marketing driven effort vs. an engineering driven effort i.e. prioritizing psychological appeasement over technical excellence. I believe marketing is important, but I prioritize it below technical excellence in this context. My vague understanding of the idea of Racket2 (prior to Sunday) was that it was a chance to make changes based on decades of learning by allowing backward compatibility to be broken if it made the resulting language better. After Sunday, I was left with the feeling that the Racket developers were considering a huge & risky undertaking in which the end result may not be better (objectively) than the current language with the hope that people who rejected Racket previously will now respect us for bending over backward to accommodate them, and join us. I think it would be difficult for me to respect a programming language community that invested such a huge effort for a lateral move. I think more people (both existing users and new users) could get excited about Racket2 if it was primarily about making Racket objectively better and only secondarily about overcoming the aesthetic objection to parens. The message of "After years of effort, now you can program in Racket without using so many parens!" does not seem compelling to me. My hope is that the primary goal of Racket2 is to provide objective improvements to the language, and that a secondary goal of attracting more users helps in deciding between similar means of accomplishing the primary goal. If the primary goal of Racket2 truly is to attract more programmers to Racket, I think it would be valuable to take a step back and consider various means to that end. While syntax may be important in accomplishing that goal, I don't think it's clear that it's the most important. Maybe the core team can take some time and clearly articulate the goal(s) for Racket2 from which everything else flows? -- 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/679e332b-146f-4636-9ca1-f06614c1158a%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
