[racket] Exploratory programming?

Hi Matthias,

> It isn't clear to me whether you have tried 
>
>   > (help "lambda") 
>
> in your emacs repl. If so, do you object to the browser coming up with intensively hyperlinked documentation? Or do you not like the format? 

(Evidently I had not.  Now that is embarrassing.  I could swear I had
tried it before, maybe back when I just had the PLT Scheme packages
installed, with only an unbound name error as the result...Is this
perhaps a recent addition?  Or could I have inadvertently done some
configuration that makes "help" available in my Racket REPL when it
wasn't before?)

> Let us know what's wrong with that. 

There's nothing wrong with it; it's great!  Thanks for pointing this out
to me.

If I had my druthers, the help function would also be a tool for
introspection.  (Is there another function designed for this?  (help
"introspection") doesn't turn up any results... :) [See examples below]
But I realize that this may be asking for precisely the kind of REPL
interaction that Racket has consciously chosen to avoid.

> I have done a lot of bottom up programming in Emacs (Scheme and Lisp) and I still do in DrRacket. But I learned that bottom-up programming is the norm and that what makes it successful is some amount of top-down planning. If you meet somewhere in the middle and explore from there, you can grow into a super-programmer. 

Indeed; I know that this is sound advice.  (I didn't mean to imply that I
didn't want to do any top-down programming -- just that I wasn't sure
how to use the Racket docs in the complementary, bottom-up way.)

Thanks, Matthias, for the advice and guidance that you (and so many
others on this!) list so consistently offer.

Best,
Richard


====================
Examples: comparing Python's help function to Racket's as a tool for
introspecting objects at the REPL 

Compare:

>>> def f(x, y):
...     "Add x and y"
...     return x + y
... 
>>> help(f)
Help on function f in module __main__:

f(x, y)
    Add x and y
 
to:

> (define (f x y)
    (+ x y))
> (help f)
Not found in any library's documentation: f

Or compare:

>>> help(3)
Help on int object:

class int(object)
 |  int(x[, base]) -> integer
 | # ...
 |  Methods defined here:
 |  
 |  __abs__(...)
 |      x.__abs__() <==> abs(x)
 |  
 |  __add__(...)
 |      x.__add__(y) <==> x+y
 | # ...

to:

> (help 3)
stdin::257: help: expects any number of literal strings, a single identifier, an identifier followed by a #:from clause, or a #:search clause; try `(help help)' for more information in: (help 3)
; ...

(Or, for the sake of comparing apples to something more resembling
apples, compare:)

> (define my-int
    (class object%
      (init-field the-integer)
      (define/public (f n)
        (new this% [the-integer (+ n the-integer)]))
      (super-new)))
> (define three (new my-int [the-integer 3]))
> (help three)
Not found in any library's documentation: three