Learn a useful language

It’s a joke! Don’t take it seriously ;) I just want to yap about why I dislike Racket.

I bought this domain on Nov. 19, 2024, give me a couple of days to cook up some examples.

Khoury is known for pumping top-notch engineers into the industry. Having students learn something that’s practically nowhere to be found (see poster) feels a bit off-brand for our co-op program right?

The syntax

Racket syntax — where parentheses are on a mission to outnumber the atoms in our universe. If any control flow is needed in your logic, and soon enough you will be lost in a sea of brackets, it’s almost poetic, in a tragic kind of way.

Let’s say we have this problem (from some random GitHub repo):

Write a function that returns whether the input is a palindrome or not, regardless of if the input value was a list, an integer, a floating point number or a string.

Look at this insanity:

(define Palindrome (lambda (x) (if ( list? x) (listPalindromeChecker x)
                                   (if (exact-integer? x) (integerPalindromeChecker  x)
                                       (if (boolean? x) '(invalid input)
                                           (if (flonum? x) (floatPalindromeChecker x)
                                               (if (string? x) (stringPalindromeChecker x) (error '(whoops)))))))))

Typed Racket

Add something more here…

Common unjustifiable justifications

“Racket is great for teaching the fundamentals of FP”

If the fundamentals include a side lesson in how to fear parentheses forever. There are plenty of functional languages that won’t leave you feeling like you need therapy after debugging a simple script.

“Racket is used for academic research”

Absolutely. It’s great for the kind of projects that are destined to never leave the lab. If your goal is to create something that lives exclusively in PDF papers and never hits the real world, Racket is perfect. But for practical use? Well, maybe stick to a language that actually has some friends outside academia.

Add something more here…

It’s not just me

2024 - Racket frustrates me by Winston Weinert, HN discussion
2019 - Re: Thoughts on Racket2 by Nicholas Yang
2019 - Post on r/uwaterloo
2016 - Racket Sucks, Don’t Try It by John Clements

You should know

This site is built with:

Soupault: static site generator (OCaml)
Pandoc: universal markup converter (Haskell)
Nix: purely functional package manager

Don’t say it’s a good language for teaching functional programming paradigm, there are plenty good alternatives.

There’s exactly 0 production-ready and widely-used software written in Racket that I know of since the beginning of my programming journey (~9 years ago). Happy to be proven wrong.

Thoughts?

Comrades? Say hi or send me more examples of Racket confusion!

Racket lovers? Opinion rejected.

echo -n 'YnJhY2tldHNAcmt0LmxvbAo=' | base64 --decode

Spread the word

Don’t worry, it’s a self-hosted instance of Plausible Analytics (written in Elixir btw, not Racket).