defn.io

Defn has been my favorite tech podcast for years. Clojure/Functional Programming etc. Hosts: Vijay Kiran, Ray McDermott https://defn.io On the other hand Entitles Opinions (about Life and Literature) is one of its kind. Host: Robert Harrison, professor of Italian Literature at Stanford. The podcast is aired from KZSU. https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu Other personal favorites: The Life Scientific and In Our Time by BBC, also Intelligence Squared.

I would like to disagree with this view of Racket. I'm a fairly experienced professional programmer with a lot of systems experience, and I find Racket an extremely well thought out, competently implemented and high performance (particularly with the switch to Chez Scheme) language. I wrote a bit about it at https://nikhilism.com/post/2023/racket-beyond-languages/ and Bogdan Popa and Alex Hirsanyi have done amazing stuff with the language https://defn.io/ https://alex-hhh.github.io/index.html including a sophisticated web framework, a Kafka GUI client and so on. I think the only deficiency for a "pragmatic for a seasoned programmer" (beyond the standard "no FAANG is sponsoring it" related lack of resources and presence in popular discussion) is the lack of good editor integration beyond emacs. That said, I've found DrRacket perfectly reasonable for my uses, although clunky. I'm not saying it can replace something like Python, but that is more because of the smaller ecosystem and contributor base than anything wrong with the language itself.

Bogdan Popa has quite a bit of interesting information about Racket on his blog. https://defn.io/ I look forward to using the new threading.

I've been working on a pure-Racket Kafka client[1] off and on (for fun) since February and it's a good amount of work. When the official protocol docs and Wireshark fail me, I usually look at librdkafka and kafka-python[2] to figure out how things are supposed to fit together. Kudos to the authors of both libraries for writing code that's easy to follow! [1]: https://defn.io/2022/03/12/ann-racket-kafka/ [2]: https://github.com/dpkp/kafka-python

https://defn.io/page/projects/ https://joeldueck.com/projects.html

> It is really used much in companies? Cisco seems to use Chez for something mysterious, a video game company scripted in Scheme, stopped and restarted again. I know a guy who does option trading in Racket, I have some large valuation models in Racket (most of the system is in and Common Lisp). I know a few guys who do vague data analysis and scripting in scheme (especially Guile or Gerbil for some reason) where their clients only care about the result. https://www.itasoftware.com/ is in scheme. There are some dead webshops(?) like https://www.greghendershott.com/2018/05/extramaze-llc-using-racket-pos… or https://defn.io/2019/08/20/racket-ecommerce/ That's about it.

Ctrl-f "racket" on his "Projects" page here, there's tonnes of stuff https://defn.io/page/projects/

Franz is a native macOS GUI for Kafka. https://defn.io/2022/11/20/ann-franz/

You might be interested in Bogdan Popa's new Racksnaps work: https://defn.io/2020/05/03/ann-racksnaps/ or Sage Gerard's new work on zcpkg: https://github.com/zyrolasting/zcpkg.