I want expand on and make sure Maria's point doesn't get lost in that firestorm over at [the case, and a proposal, for elegant syntax in #lang racket2] . Maria is bang on the money imho (her email is copied below mine)
JVM got popular because programmers didn't need to program C. Javascript and BEAM on the other hand became popular for entirely different reasons: content dissemination. BEAM is a soft-realtime vm with concurrent light-weight language threads suitable for high up-time systems. In other words switches. Yes, Erlang runs the Internet. This deluge of high bandwidth and up-time communication infrastructure opened up more than enough space for kitten photos and porn videos, then later your banking and market trading. A new niche has opened, to be filled by the HTTP browser. Enter Javascript, it rode the coat tails of another beast. Content dissemination over an Erlang point-to-point communication system. We no longer use TCP/IP to primarily connect to other machines to do resource sharing such as printing off a document, we use the internet to do content dissemination en mass. The HTTP browser is the gateway to getting pictures of our children, emails from our family and friends. Javascript rode this wave, not because of language purity, nor blind luck, it was created to solve a problem of enabling a fat server thin client model. In this light, one might see it as Javascript over Erlang. But Javascript is warty and annoying and coming to an end, a new niche is to open and be filled. Rust is quite likely going to take this cake. If you want to get Racket2 popular target WASM beat Rust to the finish line. Currently only C, C++ and Rust do a good job of this. Currently the browser enables a user to point to a domain and the application gets reproduced on their machines executing [a game, email client, etc]. Programmers are looking to easily get their programs into users hands. Users buy things which pay their salaries. I know, quite likely you're having a knee jerk at anything to do with the web. Nasty stuff that mishmash of JS, CSS and HTML. Some good engineers *in advantageous positions* have looked at this problem and have designed WASM. Advantageous, I say, because their code currently ships with every major browser, on hundreds of millions of machines right now and is begging for someone to target it. Opening up Racket2 to the browser, an environment such that we 1) get a good user interface via html 2) get dissemination of our application to users who don't need to install yet-another-vm 3) can express damn near any syntax via honu [0] 4) create fat clients in a decentralised environment is a clear winner. Sadly at the moment, WASM doesn't fit well with a dynamic language like Racket. Things like continuations in WASM and a GC would go far. Two things that Rust doesn't need. If you want to Racket2 popular make it easy for users to get the programmer's responsive applications and programmers will come in droves. Drop Chez, reimplement the Racket interpreter in Rust and target it at WASM. Easily said that done I know. Right, let's not pretend Honu is going to bring users by the droves, it might bring a few, but if you're really serious about bringing in new users aplenty this is the path to mass adoption - if you're lucky. Lastly, what I appreciate about this mailing list is the focus on the individual. Groups cannot be held accountable, only individuals can. I really and truly hope we can keep focusing on each and every individual's technical ideas and questions. For example when we first started using Racket, Matthias Felleisen made a pull request to our project doing a simple code formatting. That's when I knew this mailing list and programming language was the bee's knees. Hearts and minds won, end of story. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/racket-users/HiC7z3A5O-k/t3IRVgLTCQAJ Maria Gabriela Guimarães <maria.gabriela.guimar...@gmail.com> Thu, Jul 18, 7:52 AM (8 days ago) to Racket Hello, community! Let me tell a few words about the idea of transitioning Racket to a traditional syntax to gain popularity: I think this idea is a fallacy. Racket is not popular due to its s-expression syntax, because Clojure has such a syntax, and still, it seems popular. So I don't think such step will raise the adoption of Racket. There is nothing new in having a traditional syntax language with Lisp-like macros. There is one, it's Elixir. Note that I have lots of experience writing complex macros in Elixir, and I expect writing macros in an s-expression language to be much easier, simply because in such a language, its notation and its AST are isomorphic, i.e., they share the same syntax. Let me explain this: in Elixir, sometimes, the way to verify if a macro generates the code we want, is to see what this code's AST looks like, which in Elixir is a kind of s-expression (yes!), and from this, infer how to build the AST inside the macro using the Elixir notation; this effort is totally unnecessary in languages in which the notation and the AST are the same thing. In short: Clojure is a popular s-expression language on the JVM, and Elixir is a popular Lisp-2 language on the ErlangVM, consequently, the `Racket 2` language will contribute nothing to Racket's wide adoption. In fact, I think it will be a strategic mistake, if popularity is all about. Does Racket wants to be popular in the industry? Then Racket must focus on being a language-oriented programming ecosystem on a popular VM, like the ErlangVM, the JVM, and the WebAssemblyVM. This means to stop working on the RacketVM, if there's such a thing, and to start moving Racket's language-oriented programming features into these popular VMs. I don't think that having a kind of Elixir++ on an unpopular VM, will make the industry adopt such a language. For example, I would love to see Racket become a statically typed Lisp-like language-oriented programming ecosystem on the Erlang VM. I am sure if this ever happens, there will be hordes of programmers jumping immediately into such ecosystem. (Ehh, I think the Shen language is the closest thing there is, but oh my, nothing can have a more terrible marketing strategy than that of Shen). To conclude, I wish a great future to Racket, and will continue following its future development. Ah, I like the Hackett idea also, very very interesting, and promising direction, but again it needs to target a popular VM. Best Regards, Mário Guimarães -- 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/CA%2BLh%3Dn1ZMus90%2BmdN-qJO1SXJ1okRdWRU%2Bdk2wXa6__ai%2BVW5A%40mail.gmail.com.
