jbclements

Born on September 06, 2013•381 Karma

on April 26, 2024

I think this is a fair question. In my opinion, if you're developing a larger application then nearly all of your code will either be in the "racket" language. If you're keen on types, substantial fractions of this may be in the "typed/racket" language. It is true that all of the languages share a common substrate, and they can more or less all interoperate, but it's definitely not the case that a programmer would be likely to break their program into five equal pieces and use a different language for each one. You'll probably write your docs with scribble. Using different languages allows you to have a fundamentally different programming model, and while having that as a backdrop made things like the development of Typed Racket feasible, it isn't something that should prevent you from starting.

TL/DR: Just use Racket. If you find that you really wish that you had some other feature or style of programming, you can investigate whether there's a language that already provides that.

All of this is my opinion, of course.

jbclements•

on March 1, 2024

•on: The Emmy Computer Algebra System

Interesting, looks like Ben Greenman started work on a port to Racket, but it does appear that that work is still firmly WIP: https://github.com/bennn/mechanics

jbclements•

on Jan 15, 2024

•on: The M2 is more advanced than it seemed

I think it's probably more productive to think of this in economic terms; "nonchalance toward optimization" <-> "I can write this code in an hour instead of three hours". And, from a company's perspective: "I can get this code running acceptably at 1/3 the dev cost".

jwells89•

on Jan 15, 2024

Surely we’ve crossed a threshold of diminishing returns on this by now though? There has to be a point where the gains in convenience/DX/speed are too tiny for the costs involved and the weight of the average app ceases to grow.

jbclements•

on May 2, 2022

•on: Racket v8.5

I think the poster is referring to racket-lang.org, which is served through cloudflare. But wait! I have a solution. If you want the web site content locally, the whole thing is built from the public repo at `https://github.com/racket/racket-lang-org`. The readme contains instructions for building it locally. The CSS on the local blog posts probably won't render correctly, but if you're reading the text, that probably won't bother you.

nonrandomstring•

on May 2, 2022

Exactly this. I actually just pulled the whole source tree and built it for FreeBSD this morning.

What I'm really referring to is the community. Especially for things like forums and docs that need only be read-only. The fixation with Cloudflare bewilders me. Surely most technically minded people know it's a mixed blessing that offers as many ills as advantages?

With respects, I don't really want a conversation about the merits and madness of Cloudflare. Been there and done that. I'm simply pointing out, in case any Racket community people are here, that small details like this can have a serious impact on the uptake and enjoyment of something valuable.

samth•

on May 2, 2022

From the Racket website maintainer side, CloudFlare provides us both with a free CDN as well as free https in front of the S3 buckets that comprise the web site. Unfortunately, S3 and other AWS costs are real and Cloudflare provides a high quality and free service.

I will note that we don't host our forums ourselves so those should not be affected.

nonrandomstring•

on May 2, 2022

Appreciate that you've noted my niggle Sam.

samth•

on May 2, 2022

You can also visit http://www.racket-lang.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.co... (and similar urls) which will not use cloudflare.

jbclements•

on May 29, 2019

•on: You don't understand exceptions, but you should

Lots of good clean fun in this article. My one question: would continuation marks avoid all of the `set!` messiness?

jbclements•

on March 12, 2019

•on: Researchers find trapdoor in SwissVote election sy...

No, it's clear that the researchers are using the term trapdoor in a technical sense. Specifically, one of the key ideas in the swiss system is that it produce a proof that the votes produced as the result of the "shuffle" operation have the same meaning as the votes that are provided as inputs. The easiest "proof" of this would simply be to publish the input votes... but that would defeat the whole purpose of the shuffling. Instead, the Swiss system appears to involve a trapdoor commitment that produces a non-reversible token (hence "trapdoor") that could only be generated if this is a legitimate shuffling. As I read it, this is much like (for instance) a SHA-256 hash of an input message that can be generated to ensure that a document has not been tampered with.

jbclements•

on Jan 4, 2018

•on: After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahe...

Sounds like you have a good source of information; any chance you can share pointers? Thanks! Apologies if I missed this in upstream posts.

adventured•

on Jan 4, 2018

Akamai's State of the Internet quarterly reports are the only authoritative source I'm familiar with that confidently publishes at a global data scale. They have one of the only true global networks, that reach basically into every market. They're the only global network that I know that publishes routine detailed information like that. It's not perfect, I'm not aware of anything better however. They've been publishing it for a number of years, so there's a decent tracking history of trends over time.

Here's the Q12017 pdf:

https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...

jbclements•

on Nov 24, 2017

•on: The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)

Okay, this is going to sound mean, but this is like the definition of p-hacking. When you look at 30 values, you simply can't be surprised that one of them is lower than the mean, with a p value around 1/20th. Use something like a Bonferroni correction, to get a significance level of 1/600. Does the result still stand up? In fact, there's an xkcd about this very topic. https://www.xkcd.com/882/

drhagen•

on Nov 24, 2017

I completely agree that it's important to take this kind of thing into account when approaching a problem like this. As I say in the post, "There are 31 days and one of them has to be smallest. Maybe the 11th isn’t an outlier; it’s just on the smaller end and our eyes are picking up on a pattern that doesn’t exist."

I'll admit that a straight p-value is not the appropriate statistic here. I don't even know how what the perfect statistic for this problem is. A Bonferroni correction is not enough because not only is the 11th of the month the lowest for a particular year--it's the lowest for every year.

I was convinced that this was real when I looked at the first line graph of the post. The 11th is the lowest either every year or almost every year, being 3-5 standard deviations below the mean for the bulk of the last 200 years. That just can't happen by chance no matter how you slice it.

If anyone knows the proper way to calculate a statistic on something like this, I would love to hear about it.

cperciva•

on Nov 24, 2017

The significance is absolutely robust. In the early 20th century the measured counts of "<month> 11th" are many standard deviations off.

jbclements•

on Oct 3, 2017

•on: Socratic method to teaching by asking

No, I think that the socratic method can be much more intensely infuriating because it's clear that the teacher is withholding the answer from you. (FWIW, I use the socratic method a lot... so I'm definitely familiar with students getting mad at me.)

jbclements•

on Oct 3, 2017

•on: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed...

(Mostly just hoisting Noel Welsh's comment to the top level) How will the expected upcoming move of Racket to the use of Chez affect the comparison between Gerbil and Racket? I'm trying not to set my expectations too high. BTW: RacketCon! This weekend!

baldfat•

on Oct 3, 2017

I am super excited for Chez. If we see the speed we are look at a possible doubling in speed.

There is certainly a reason why he has stuck with Gambit and not my beloved Racket. This seems perfect for using Racket's macros. I just don't know Gambit's Macros well enough to compare them to Racket.

Here is the Bench Marks for Chez, Racket and Gambit https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

WindowsFon4life•

on Oct 3, 2017

Gerbil is there as well.

616c•

on Oct 4, 2017

No way!!! Holy crap balls will this get interesting. To be clear, is this what mflatt's racket7 repo is all about!? This is what I found from quick Googling.

https://github.com/racket/racket7

Is this like research work like Pycket (Racket on PyPy) or is this a blessed project and Rackets official implementation will cut over

capnrefsmmat•

on Oct 4, 2017

It's the official goal of Racket to be based on Chez in the next couple years:

> TL;DR: I expect the main Racket distribution to run on Chez Scheme instead of the current Racket VM sometime in the next couple of years.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-dev/2BV3ElyfF8Y/4RSd3...