[scythe]

One aspect of Racket that I would expect to appeal to students, but which does not appear in this blog post, is its cross-platform (and widget-native!) GUI framework:

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

The first "side-project" I ever did was a tic-tac-toe program in Java AWT during my first year of programming in high school. AWT wasn't even part of the curriculum, it was just what I gravitated towards as a 13-year-old whose experience with computers consisted entirely of graphical applications.

Maybe the kids these days would be more interested in building a web app or something, but frankly I don't think it's surprising that writing code that primarily consumes and emits text at a terminal is not interesting to students who have never had any need for a terminal before.

[steinuil]

I love racket/gui and recently shipped a product using it for a diagnostics tool! The killer features are as you said that it uses native widgets, but also that it doesn't require any sort of dynamic linking to heavyweight C libraries (other than the ones Racket itself comes with) and that you can easily compile it in a redistributable form with basically no dependencies for all platforms. I can't recommend it enough.

[tonfreed]

Can confirm, I very quickly picked up Swing when I started Java programming just because I wanted to make little games and cellular automata. Before that, we'd had Haskell forced upon us and the GUI stuff had been very difficult for a beginner to pick up.

[Bootvis]

I tried (not very hard) to see some screenshots but failed. Do you know of a gallery with example code?

[samth]

https://alex-hhh.github.io/2021/09/screenshots.html is a nice gallery of one person's apps.