On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 1:48 PM Brian Adkins <lojicdot...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
The discussions about changing syntax are not about aesthetics. There are some
genuine pain points in Racket that could be fixed with alternate
syntax. For instance,
it's easy for structure and array access to become unwieldy in
practice. Even a simple
example can show how awkward it can be. Suppose you have:
(struct person (first middle last))
(define john (person "John" "Allen" "Smith"))
Now you want the person's initials. In Racket, the code is:
(string (string-ref (person-first john) 0)
(string-ref (person-middle john) 0)
(string-ref (person-last john) 0))
There's a load of cognitive and syntactic overhead compared to something like:
john.first[0] + john.middle[0] + john.last[0]
Even as someone who has programmed in Scheme for 30 years, I have to spend
a couple seconds to grasp what the Racket code is doing, while the alternative
syntax is almost instantly understandable.
Making changes to eliminate such pain points may help new users to
consider Racket,
but even if they don't, there is still plenty of benefit to existing
Racket programmers.
Justin
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