> I'm curious about how the new Racket syntax works out, but also mildly skeptical. . . I fear that a "lisp" where the ASTs don't look exactly like the text I see in the editor is a lisp that has had its soul amputated.
FWIW I talked to Matthias Felleisen about this to some degree this past summer. I asked whether he felt homoiconicity is important, and he essentially said that no, it wasn't particularly important so long as whatever system you arrive at has a sufficiently well-considered design. (Though he couldn't/wouldn't tell me which aspects of syntax he felt are important to designing a metaprogramming system as complete as Racket's.)
It's also worth noting that Racket's syntax is not changing. Matthew has said that he regrets calling his proposed project "Racket 2" because he never really intended it to subsume Racket, but rather to be a sister-project. The new name is Rhombus, and his proposed syntax uses what he calls "shrubbery notation" [0].
FWIW I talked to Matthias Felleisen about this to some degree this past summer. I asked whether he felt homoiconicity is important, and he essentially said that no, it wasn't particularly important so long as whatever system you arrive at has a sufficiently well-considered design. (Though he couldn't/wouldn't tell me which aspects of syntax he felt are important to designing a metaprogramming system as complete as Racket's.)
It's also worth noting that Racket's syntax is not changing. Matthew has said that he regrets calling his proposed project "Racket 2" because he never really intended it to subsume Racket, but rather to be a sister-project. The new name is Rhombus, and his proposed syntax uses what he calls "shrubbery notation" [0].
[0] https://github.com/mflatt/rhombus-brainstorming/blob/shrubbe...