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A comment on Ask HN: Companies using Racket?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Companies using Racket? by a1369209993 on Saturday November 03, 2018 @04:04PM (#18372175)
Not the querient, but my first experience with Racket was something to the effect of:

  > (cons 'foo 'bar)
  ! error: bar is not a list
There were several other condescendingly-reported gross implementation defects like this, most damningly a inability to define macros, which meant that Racket is not in fact a LISP, and the syntactic homogenity that makes LISPs annoying to work with (at the benfit of being able to generate and rewrite arbitrary program fragments on demand) serves no purpose whatsoever.

I later found out that this was apparently due to having been provided with a "teaching" version of the interpreter intended for beginning students (who presuably don't know any better), which makes it even worse.

I would definitely characterize my attitude toward Racket as "hate", and if acbart made the same mistake my (generally quite reasonable and competent) CS professor did, I wouldn't be surprised if their students felt likewise.

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Re:Ask HN: Companies using Racket? by dzpower on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:24PM (#18372549)
It does sound like you were expecting a full Lisp and instead were greeted with one of the Beginner Languages, intended to teach first time programmers in a very structured way. See https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/htdp-langs.html

The example that you give is not an error in full Racket:

  Welcome to DrRacket, version 6.12 [3m].
  Language: racket, with debugging.
  > (cons 'foo 'bar)
  '(foo . bar)
Similarly, full Racket has multiple, powerful macro systems, and more besides, deliberately excluded from the Teaching Languages.

* * *

I'm not an academic, but the community and core Racket team are incredibly supportive, and any Comp Sci professor running into difficulties teaching a Racket-based course can easily access plenty of support and guidance, starting by contacting the user mailing list.

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Re:Ask HN: Companies using Racket? by dragonwriter on Saturday November 03, 2018 @06:11PM (#18372769)
> I later found out that this was apparently due to having been provided with a "teaching" version of the interpreter intended for beginning students (who presuably don't know any better), which makes it even worse.

I think you still misunderstand; racket doesn't have different interpreter/compiler versions with different language features, racket code explicitly can request different languages via a language directive (I think there is a corresponding UI option in the Dr. Racket UI.) Among the preinstalled options are a series of teaching languages designed to accompany the textbook How to Design Programs, among others.

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Re:Ask HN: Companies using Racket? by spacesuitman2 on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:02PM (#18372471)
That's unfortunate. Perhaps people should be informed about `#lang racket` first, but I'm not sure how you missed this. It's fairly easy to see in the documentation.
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Re:Ask HN: Companies using Racket? by soegaard on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:57PM (#18372710)
As you point out: Racket is different from the teaching languages.
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