I'll assert that Racket is currently for a subset of the people who are
allowed to choose whatever tools they want: academics, hobbyists, people
developing small tools for individual use (like sysadmins did with
Perl), and... some startups. Most organizations, you can't choose any
tools you want.
I currently suspect that startup successes are the most likely way
Racket could become permissible for people who can't choose whatever
tools they want, for reasons implied below.
Sage Gerard wrote on 9/18/19 6:25 PM:
I know there are not enough Racket programmers out there to justify
many risks in maintaining large Racket projects in large firms,
This is something some people think, and there's some validity to it, if
you want interchangeable commodity developers. But using a fringe
language with a cult following is arguably an advantage for attracting
better talent than you otherwise could, with your pay or the initial
appeal of your project.
For example, ITA Software wasn't able to hire a fleet of brainiacs and
FAANG-employable fresh MIT grads by saying "uh, we're going to plug into
a musty old mainframe network, and add that to your resume". The pitch
that attracted many was more like "We're going to use Lisp to do
something big we don't think could be accomplished with mainstream
languages, and you get to use Lisp and get paid for it, and, hey, did we
mention Lisp".
There seem to be many more fringe language programmers than there are
paying jobs for them.
Also, you can make more, rapidly. I'm pretty sure I can teach a
programmer modified-Pascal-style Racket in a day, and have them start
coding on real product, and then incrementally build them up from there,
in more idiomatic Racket and libraries, in parallel to them churning out
programming work. It's not difficult.
A related concern is to not want umpteen different languages within an
organization. More reuse, more flexibility in reassigning human
resources, possibly ease of integrating, etc.
At least as big a concern as staffing is whether a fringe technology
will do what you need. We know what tools other companies are using
successfully, and different tools tend to be considered unproven or
inadequate.
so I emphasize the word "try" in my question. I'm hoping your stories
might help me learn how to get more professionals to be at least
curious about it.
The more I use Racket the more I wonder why so many other people
/aren't, /even if only to learn more.[...] When I bring it up, people
look at me like I'm that crazy guy yammering about veganism or Crossfit
Among Web developers, there seems to be what has the appearance of
vegan/Crossfitter true-believing (and also evangelizing, once you're in
on it), and a lot of it seems directed at constantly adding what you
think is or will be the next big employable thing on your resume. This
valuable thing to add to your resume can be particular latest Web
frameworks, cloud services and cloud architecture keywords, programming
languages, etc.
I suspect hardly anyone currently thinks Racket will be the next big
thing (as much as we like to use it).
Also remember a lot of developers are intentionally hopping jobs every 2
years, which might've started as pursuit of the most promising dotcom
IPO lottery ticket, but now seems to be institutionalized professional
practice among employees, and, consequently, employers. Which
intuitively might lead to employees prioritizing resume-distinction,
over their projects working well beyond when they're next hopping (e.g.,
when they hit their vesting cliff, in 5 months and 3 days).
Aside from that, there's also the genuine nerdy techie side among many
developers, and they can get interested if you have something new and
interesting to say, *but* a working adult probably won't be much
interested in pursuing it themselves, unless it's a keyword they think
is currently/imminently in-demand on resumes.
Sometimes genuine nerdy techies will do blog or social media posts on
fringe things, which incidentally promote personal brands as smart
people with breadth, and is something some employers/schools look for,
without investing a funded project on any of the fringe things.
Promotion-wise, for a fringe technology, I see such posts and tutorials
as messages put in bottles, tossed into the ocean, in the hopes that the
bottle will be picked up by a passing boat halfway across the ocean, and
it will be a happen to be a boat of a funded startup team, and they
decide to use Racket, and plot a course for our pretty little island.
We've been tossing bottles after other people's distant boats that we
couldn't even see, for well over a decade. In that time, we hardly
built any of our own boats and airplanes, which, in hindsight, might've
been a more expedient way to reach those other people's boats.
I said nothing above about parentheses, which used to be a common thing
for people to raise as objections to Lisps. Today, other languages have
captured a lot of the selling points of Lisp, and we're mainly down to
strength for DSLs. And I think you might get more negative reaction
today by talking about DSLs than by showing parentheses -- because it
seems a lot of people now have negative impressions of DSLs, from
attempts they've seen elsewhere, and you now have to show bigger wins to
get past prior judgments. (At this point, when some people are buying
Polaroid film and vinyl records, and searching for nebulous qualities
like authenticity, parentheses could even become fashionable, but I
suspect they won't get used for much paid work until they're already
perceived as good for paid work, and come with a resume boost.)
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