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by jstewartmobile 3466 days ago
The docs are the only part I go to, and they look the same (not a bad thing, because they were always beautiful).

Felleisen and and his group have been working on Racket for a long time, and it shows. I think PG's Arc even runs on top of it.

Only gripe I can register is that they have gone full-speed-ahead on the DSL/metaprogramming aspect which kind of works against the language. See Tarver's "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer," or Alan Kay's quote: "Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

1 comments

> I think PG's Arc even runs on top of it.

That so? Then what's the actual use-case for Arc again? It's a Lisp, Racket is a Lisp, hence a Lisp running on another Lisp? "Lisps all the way up"? ---well that's not unconsistent with the target audience I'm sure ;)

The case for and against Arc is the same as for any other programming language: Does the syntactic sugar over the Turing Tarpit make the task at hand easier or harder. None of which is to suggest that I typically see anyone making a strong case for Arc these days.

I mean if anyone really was actually making any kind of case for Arc, they'd probably start with organizing it and promoting it in ways that would facilitate its inclusion as just another language in the batteries included distributions of Racket.