So I guess I managed to soak up enough Racket to write a mostly useless function on the spot in the REPL to show off the relative terseness to my coworker. I didn't get the parens right at first, but it was still effective in providing an example of why I like it.
(define (hello) (if (string? "Hello, World\n") (printf "Hello, World!\n") (printf "What have you done?!\n")))
(hello)
@architect
How is racket compared to other LISPs?
@yisraeldov I've got no idea. But it's not built on top of the JVM like Scala or Clojure, which is a huge win for me, and it has fairly rich documentation on how to use it as it was designed as an educational language.
I'd assume something like Julia or SBCL might be able to provide better performance, but I've not had any real complaints with Racket so far.
@yisraeldov To expand on this some, I've never used any LISP for much, including Racket, but I like that it's well documented and has reasonable performance with a focus on functional programming.
I'm only guessing that Julia would be more performant, but it's something that I've been wanting to experiment with as well and seems to have pretty good performance from what I've seen online so far.
@architect @yisraeldov not sure I mentioned this before. but Emacs. To start with Lisp emacs and specifically the *scratch* buffer is an interactive Lisp environment.
@Absinthe @architect Wow! Also there is this great video that someone did about using lisp in #emacs . There seems to be a whole series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLUcgEwSF_c&list=PLrFss89N5XNw8JMVSWJOwailCu8PC-ZZ_&index=7
@yisraeldov @architect and if you are not an Emacs guy, just install evil mode and use vim keys. :)
@Absinthe @architect NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! Do you think it is a coincidence that it is called EVIL!? I hate when I install a package and the default keys are this IJKL nonsense! Practitioners of EVIL are going to burn in hell!
@yisraeldov @architect that's not what RMS says :) But, if you are an Emacs person, then no need to install evil.
@yisraeldov @architect well huzzah for an MOT regardless of denominational relationship :)
@yisraeldov MOT - member of the tribe. Sorry, it's a "Jewish" thing. You were going in that direction with the hasid and UO reference, I thought I was in the same metaphorical space :)
@Absinthe Ok, yeah I know what that is, just didn't recognise the Roshei Teivos.
@yisraeldov Pretty sure it isn't in it :)
@Absinthe @architect RMS, is part of the "Church of Emacs." For him you just need to accept emacs into your heart to be saved. I am an Emacs Hasid (Ultra orthodox ) I do not compromise my beliefs to make them more palatable to nobelivers.