[racket] Sweet expressions; or making it easier to introduce Racket to me and my coworkers :-)

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 07:13:07PM +0200, Danny Wilson wrote:
> Hi List,
> 
> Short version: is there an implementation of
> http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html  for
> typed/racket or just racket?
> 
> 
> Long version:
> 
> The past few days I've gotten really excited about the possibilities
> of using the Racket for my projects. I'm mostly a self-taught
> programmer without a CS or scheme background. Currently I'm working
> on a rather large (web)application project, consisting of:  haXe,
> some Scala, PHP (unfortunately) a bit of D and modifications to
> C/C++
> 
> I tend to make enough typo's in my coding to appreciate static
> typing. Having tried scheme and lisp now and then, I couldn't really
> get over everything being dynamically typed - (as well not finding
> any mentioning or guarantees about performance, memory usage or
> anything like that). Typed Racket got me very excited.

My son tried  to gat a web site working using the RAcket web engine.  In 
the end, he failed.  He had rented virtual machine from a server 
provider, and discovered that Racket just used too much active memory 
for that configuration to be practical.  Every now and then his 
virtual machine would blow up in memory usage and crash.  Given more 
real memory, or maybe a machine to itself, it might have worked 
quite well.  He eventually switched other software, despite having a 
kind of love aaffair with Scheme.

> 
> I 'get' the lovelyness of code as data, as i've written a few code
> generators to reduce boilerplate. But getting my head to read the
> deeper nested (if (some thing) (else branch)) structures is somewhat
> painfull.  Especially for my colleagues who never have tried
> programming in any lisp or even heard of it.
> 
> I noticed the Holu language, but couldn't find any examples of what
> it might look like. Can languages like holy and typed/racket be
> combined somehow? Again I've just started using DrRacket so maybe
> these are all very obvious questions.
> 
> 
> Thanks!
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