[racket] Exploratory programming?

Richard Lawrence wrote at 11/30/2010 11:55 AM:
> [1] I have so far mostly stayed away from DrRacket, because I know Emacs well and haven't felt the desire or need so far to learn another environment.  Is that my problem?  Does DrRacket support the kind of bottom-up exploration in the documentation that I'm trying to describe?
>   

I tell people to spend time trying out DrRacket, even if they are 
long-time Emacs power-users like me.

DrRacket won't give you quite as good an experience in documentation and 
system code exploration as the Smalltalk-80 system browser, IMHO, but 
the navigability from code to docs in a Web browser window is pretty 
good.  You might find that features like Check Syntax are good for 
exploring code, too.  DrRacket has a somewhat different take on the 
REPL, in which it tolerates you experimenting interactively a little 
while in a dirty REPL in the Interactions pane, but then it wants you to 
get out of the mud and paste your resulting code into the Definitions 
(file) pane, where you can hit Ctrl-T to evaluate the code in a fresh 
environment.  Other than Check Syntax, DrRacket's other big feature that 
can tempt Emacs devotees is the wonderful terrific Macro Stepper.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/