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by iddiid 2218 days ago
From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion)

But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah.

(1) https://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/all.html

My personal opinion: I think racket is more an ivory tower for researcher, many for northwest university. “PLT” refers to the group that is the core of the Racket development team. PLT consists of numerous people distributed across several different universities in the USA.

As I am getting older I should prefer some middle ground between racket and go. Hygienic macros are difficult to understand in this context, that is I don't want to buy the power of hygienic macros, it is over sold.

Anyway, I admire Mattew Flatt efforts in compilation tecniques and the author of Beautiful Racket.

2 comments

So, what is it that you don't like about Racket macros? The quote doesn't explain it. Is it the fact that there are some concepts to learn before you can use them effectively?

> that precludes hygienic macros.

The fact that you are so fixated on hygiene as problematic, but can't really explain why you think it's like this, is a huge red herring.

This is FAR from a research language. What multi-purpose language is a research first language? Racket is no Haskell.