xrayspec

IMO the big news in this release is the relicensing from LGPL to dual Apache / MIT.

https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-rel...

Jaron Lanier challenged Kevin Kelly to produce evidence that his theory was true, which AFAICT never emerged, so by Kelly's own terms, "I surrender the case".

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-case-agains/

Disagree on Stack Exchange, I'm afraid. It's a vampire that has pushed the costs of its service down on unpaid contributors (esp members of open-source communities) and privatized the benefits. Similar to Medium, that's time & energy that those programmers could've spent enhancing the knowledge archives of their own open-source communities.

Riposte?

https://docs.racket-lang.org/riposte/

The author acknowledges that other languages can be used for DSLs. He claims that Racket's hygienic macro system is the special feature that makes it superior for the task.

IIUC Babel.js is essentially a fancy preprocessor for JS. So if by that analogy, you mean "can I use Racket to design my own notation that compiles to Python", yes of course.

Also https://blog.racket-lang.org/

> I don't use web fonts.

Well, actually ... yes you do (Proxima Nova). Some of it is even thin!

https://floobits.com/

Respectfully dude, I clicked through to your sites because I was curious to see how you apply your own design advice. It seems that mostly, you don't. Your blog [1] even employs the monochrome, typo-centric style that Butterick seems to like.

[1] https://geoff.greer.fm

Butterick made his own programming language called Pollen [1] to publish this site. [2] Pollen is implemented in the Racket programming language. [3] He has another online book called Beautiful Racket [4] about language-oriented programming in Racket.

[1] https://pollenpub.com

[2] https://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html

[3] https://racket-lang.org

[4] https://beautifulracket.com

"on a public webpage" = "as difficult as possible"?

Also, author addresses these objections:

https://beautifulracket.com/why-you-should-pay.html

This is great. I would love to see the source for this. Would you consider posting it?

Oh please. Jeff Jones knew what he was signing up for.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, "that Uber didn't go crazy; that Uber went Uber"

Racket is also a great environment for making languages. See, e.g.:

http://beautifulracket.com

> just a string-based templating system

Not sure what you mean. Pollen is derived from Racket's text-based DSL, Scribble. Like Scribble, Pollen lets you embed Racket-style S-expressions in your documents. Moreover, Pollen documents compile into X-expressions (= the Racket equivalent of SXML).

Supports MathJax http://pkg-build.racket-lang.org/doc/pollen/mini-tutorial.ht...

MZ Scheme was a precursor to Racket. Same people, AFAIK same core codebase.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/mzscheme

Where do you see this? On my machine it's not hyphenated

> You still have to roll your own CSS and any JavaScript

True, though you can automate those files (and any other text-based files) with Pollen as well, so you can use common functions and data across all of them.

Also, here's the previous discussion of Pollen on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057

Ordinal and cardinal exponentiation use similar notation, but they don't work the same way. Though it's common to see statements like "ω is the same as \aleph_0," it's misleading, because 2^ω = ω, and thus has lesser cardinality than 2^\aleph_0.

See also the "warning" here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_arithmetic#Exponentiati...

> the word for this archaic job. This person did layout after the articles had been typeset.

pasteup