Language itself

Racket is a dialect of /Scheme, which is a member of Lisp family. The language is dynamically typed, multiparadigm, /FP capable. Racket has an interactive REPL, a cross-platform compiler, even its own IDE, Dr.Racket.

For now, the Racket team is migrating the language’s core to the Chez Scheme so Racket will be pretty fast someday!

Language-Oriented Programming

The core idea behind the language is “Language-Oriented Programming”: you are designing and implementing the domain-specific languages just for every domain you work with! Here is a great talk about LOP: “Lambda World 2019 - Language-Oriented Programming with Racket”".

Also, there is a book “Beautiful Racket” just about the LOP.

Batteries included

The Racket as a platform has a nice set of “batteries”. For example, a really great set of libraries to work with graphics/animations/games. Here is a talk about this aspect: “big-bang: the world, universe, and network in the programming language”. I have played with this stuff myself: made some pieces of generative art. You can take a look at them here.

Another thing in Racket world I played with is /Pollen: my recursive.one site was made using it.

Resources

• “Deploying Racket Web Apps”, a quick intro to raco distribute and to resource file handling
• “The Missing Guide to Racket’s Web Server” + “Continuations in Racket’s Web Server”
• Macros:
  • Fear of Macros
  • Mythical Macros
  • The syntax/parse library docs and examples

Notable packages

• infix, an infix notation as an eDSL.
• syntax/parse, “a framework for writing macros and processing syntax”, helps to define macros with very descriptive error reporting.
• racket-gui-easy, a neat wrapper around Racket’s own /GUI library. It uses the concept of observables those look very similar to /Clojure’s atoms.

Ecosystem

• RackSnaps (an announcement), the simple way to lock all the packages (yep, the raco does not do that)
• Racket Templates, an “unofficial collection of racket app templates”.

Need to play with

• racket-sdl2, a bindings to the [libsdl2(https://libsdl.org/)