On Wednesday, August 14, 2019 at 10:39:52 AM UTC-4, Matthew Flatt wrote: > > The Racket project leadership [see signature at end] hasn't had a > chance to meet and discuss since RacketCon. When it does meet, we > should be able to offer a plan for both the future development of > Racket and the process of involving everyone in that development. > > [...] > > - Jay, Matthew, Matthias, Robby, and Sam >
Thank you for that preliminary statement; I look forward to hearing the plan after the project leadership has had a chance to meet. I want to offer just one suggestion for consideration when you meet. I've talked to a number of people from various language backgrounds and practices to (hopefully) balance my own biases on this matter, and I think it's possible that the syntax experiment may be unique with respect to the types of changes one might expect in a language community. My suggestion is that if the syntax experiment is successful, and the new syntax is chosen as the default language for the Racket community, the existing s-expression syntax of #lang racket may need to be treated in such a way as to avoid all appearances of deprecation. This might include, for example: * Not using adjectives such as "deprecated", "legacy", "unstable", etc. * Not putting the link to #lang racket documentation at the very bottom of this page: https://docs.racket-lang.org/ where R5RS, Scheme, MZScheme are located. * Not using phrases such as: "Do not use #lang racket to start new projects; #lang racket2 is the preferred language" which can be seen here: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scheme/index.html I understand that, if the new syntax is successful, you will want to promote it as the default/main language, and that you'll want to spend most of your resources on the new language; however, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that #lang racket would then need to go the way of the other legacy languages which, while they may not have "gone away", and there may be programs that "still run", are certainly not viewed as attractive languages with which to use for an ambitious new project. However, if after meeting together, the project leadership does not feel this way, then please be direct in your communication so those of us who have invested much in a #lang racket codebase can make an informed decision about how to proceed. Thanks, Brian Adkins -- 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/48a41a0a-d30a-4bae-8f67-7a2213584f62%40googlegroups.com.
