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Good question! The compiler is definitely the main application that's been written. We're not aware of any standalone Pyret applications on the order of more than a few KLOC, but those are quite different in flavor, like course infrastructure. The next largest chunk of Pyret code out there is assignments for various courses and curricula, which are our major users and macro-scale test cases. In fact, this is a useful perspective on what we get feedback from: a broad and shallow set of use cases in education. This leads us to focus on the first-time use cases, especially on the first time seeing an error message, the first time writing a test, the English vocabulary that lines up with explaining code to a number of different audiences (especially at different age levels), and the snags and inconsistencies in syntax in even extremely short programs. Of course, it's been _used_ by plenty of students and their teachers, who have written now thousands of their own interpreters and video games and graph algorithms and image-generation programs and type-checkers and data structures in Pyret. Finally, the design of Pyret is intentionally conservative. Pyret is not a research experiment in some particular new and untested language feature; in fact, such features are almost by definition kept out of the language. Therefore, we believe we're building on a long tradition of crisp, clear language definitions inspired by the lambda-calculus, with little by way of weirdness or frippery. |