<story><title>Racket Is an Acceptable Python (2019)</title><url>https://dustycloud.org/blog/racket-is-an-acceptable-python/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paroneayea</author><text>Author of this blogpost here.  I think the post is good, though it&amp;#x27;s mostly aimed at the perspective of &amp;quot;Racket is a very practical Lisp, for getting things done, akin to how Python is a very practical lisp&amp;quot; and also &amp;quot;DrRacket gives an accessible entry-point for Lisp for newcomers.&amp;quot;  Unfortunately I don&amp;#x27;t think Racket quite took this to be the rallying cry I hoped them to, to embrace Racket&amp;#x27;s lispiness &lt;i&gt;as&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;The Python of Lisps&amp;quot; (which was the other alternate title I was debating between when I wrote it).&lt;p&gt;But in the comments here and as with most articles about Lisp, the conversation moves to... can newcomers understand Lisp&amp;#x27;s syntax?  My spouse and I gave a talk about this very topic: &amp;quot;Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fosdem.org&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;schedule&amp;#x2F;event&amp;#x2F;lispforeveryone&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fosdem.org&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;schedule&amp;#x2F;event&amp;#x2F;lispforeveryone&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a lot in there (including demonstrations of representations of lisp which &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have parentheses at all).  But the biggest point in the talk is that lisp &lt;i&gt;isn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; scary for &lt;i&gt;new&lt;/i&gt; programmers... it&amp;#x27;s scary for &lt;i&gt;experienced&lt;/i&gt; programmers.  As we talk about in the video, my spouse and I co-ran introductions to programming using Racket aimed at humanities students with no required prior programming experience whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;What we found was that the students who had &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; prior programming experience, after just a few minutes, had no problem with the syntax (and DrRacket made it easy enough to pick up the language).  But we &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; have complaints in the class about lisp&amp;#x27;s syntax... from those who &lt;i&gt;already knew how to program.&lt;/i&gt;  They already had a frame, and within that frame, lisp&amp;#x27;s syntax looked alien.  &lt;i&gt;Without&lt;/i&gt; a frame, students just accepted it and did fine with the syntax... great, even.  (Many of them praised its clarity; like any decent lisp editor, DrRacket helps identify the kinds of parentheses-oriented errors that users &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; they&amp;#x27;re going to encounter.)&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I do more work in Guile these days than Racket, but both are really great systems with great communities.  The thing I miss most about Racket though is that DrRacket gave an easy entry point for students which wasn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;and now start learning Emacs&amp;quot;.  (Guix is pretty great, however.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Racket Is an Acceptable Python (2019)</title><url>https://dustycloud.org/blog/racket-is-an-acceptable-python/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dark-star</author><text>We used Racket in the early 2000&amp;#x27;s at university, in the first year of CS. Everyone (including me) was appalled by it (we already knew C, Pascal, Java, etc.)&lt;p&gt;After a few weeks it &amp;quot;clicked&amp;quot;, and since then I&amp;#x27;ve been a huge fan of Scheme. When other students went out of their way to write C-to-Scheme converters to keep coding their homework in C, if you fully embraced the language it felt something close to enlightenment ;-)&lt;p&gt;I used Scheme later to teach programming to absolute non-science people and they all simply &amp;quot;got&amp;quot; how it worked, even though they had previously struggled doing even very basic things in Excel Macros and the like.&lt;p&gt;Scheme is a perfect tool for learning how to program, and it is even useful later to write complex programs in production. Yes, C might be faster, and Python might have more hits on StackOverflow, but to really understand the concepts behind polymorphism, recursion, lazy evaluation, oop, etc. Scheme helps a lot with it&amp;#x27;s simple syntax.</text></comment>