[racket] thank you for typed racket

On Feb 22, 2011, at 11:01 AM, Danny Yoo wrote:

>>  -- I wrote a compiler
>>  -- I benefited from TR because ...
>>  -- And I need X Y and Z from R because pedestrian languages
>>        such as ML and Haskell don't support it
> 
> I should add that I'm using other parts of Racket, like the web-server
> package, to let me write automated tests on the prototype.  A problem
> that I need to deal with is: once I've generated some JavaScript, how
> do I test it automatically with a real web browser's evaluator?  I
> want all my tests to be expressed in Racket, and I don't want to
> depend on any external packages, such as Selenium.  So I'm using
> web-server to feed JavaScript and get back evaluated results back into
> Racket.  See:
> 
> https://github.com/dyoo/js-sicp-5-5/blob/master/browser-evaluate.rkt
> 
> and:
> 
> https://github.com/dyoo/js-sicp-5-5/blob/master/test-browser-evaluate.rkt
> 
> for a preliminary sketch.


Danny, 

1. Thanks for playing along. Keep this response handy just in case you 
get ever asked why you did't just develop this compiler in a plain old, 
well-established statically typed language. The mix-and-match approach 
-- a good scriptable web-server that can be used from within the 
language -- and types when you need them is a nice sophisticated example
of what we imagined. (I still want to see ML people do much better with 
Xexprs than strings.) 

2. I am sorry for carrying out this dialog on 'users' I thought we were 
on 'dev' and wanted to take this as an opportunity to explain the 
rationale once again. 

Perhaps others have learned something anyway. -- Matthias