

Racket 5.2 Released - gcr
http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2011-November/048984.html

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dragonquest
From the release notes I see a new 'db' lib has been added which'll work out-
of-the-box with PGSQL, MySQL, SQLite and ODBC. No more fetching different
PlaneT packages for different databases, plus it has the added benefit of
being in the core. Great work by the Racket Team :) lots of batteries
included!

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exDM69
Would How to Design Programs (<http://www.htdp.org/>) and Racket be a good
combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even
has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the
subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book.

And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with
lots of bells and whistles to make things that go bing. There's also GUI REPL
tool called Dr. Racket.

I just checked racket out from Git, and it was easy to build and install (on
an out-of-date Ubuntu) and they had binaries available too.

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noahl
I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually (<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-
text/book/book.html>). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation
around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea
of what is important to teach first. SICP deals with more fundamental issues,
and is much more worth your time. Although I should point out that I have only
read a bit of HTDP, and looked at the table of contents.

~~~
exDM69
SICP is excellent but I'm not sure if it should be the first touch you have to
programming. HTDP might be a little more practical and easy to approach. Maybe
for a computer scientist, SICP would be fine but for someone who wants to
learn a little bit of coding, SICP is overkill.

Also, SICP's examples are intended for people with strong background in maths,
etc (what you can expect from a CS student), like the examples on finding
square roots or doing symbolic differentiation. Don't get me wrong, though. I
personally like these examples a lot but I'm a pretty hard core CS geek.

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JoelMcCracken
Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use. That list of
features is awesome. This, just a few months since they redid all of Racket's
graphics library. Well done!

~~~
rhizome31
> Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use.

I use Racket to study SICP so I haven't looked into the Racket language at
all, but I can give you my impressions about the programming environment. On
my netbook running Ubuntu, DrRacket is extremely slow and short keys don't
work. I've found how to use the racket interpreter using (enter! "myfile.scm")
and how to enable readline support, but it wasn't obvious at first. On my
laptop also running Ubuntu, DrRacket is usable but strangely (enter! ...)
raises an error. This gives the impression that the whole environment is not
well polished. I think it would be useful to have an easy-to-find
straightforward tutorial on how to use Racket with any editor and the text-
based REPL, as many people are probably not keen on using DrRacket.

This is not a criticism or even an opinion but merely a feeling I'm expressing
here, I'm sure I could (and will) address all these issues with more RTFM.

~~~
noelwelsh
Just a quick note: enter! doesn't really make sense in DrRacket. When you
evaluate your code in DrRacket it does the equivalent of an enter! for you. If
you want help drop into #racket. I'll be there in a couple of hours.

 _Update:_ You might also want to read this page on using Racket with text
editors: <http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/other-editors.html>

~~~
rhizome31
Thank you for the helpful reply. I might show up on IRC sometime or ask my
questions on the users mailing list.

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bitstream
The new plot library is brilliant! Thanks to all involved.

