[racket] Getting started with R6RS

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> they’re really not at all so great for somebody like me, who expects
>> to understand every line of the first source-code file he’s writing
>> in a language that is new to him, as he writes them.
>
> The main thing that I think was a failure here is to understand that
> Racket is truly a multilingual environment that allows different
> languages to co-exist.  With that view there is nothing wrong with
> presenting it as a kind of a magic -- it serves a *very* similar
> purpose to something that is known as "magic numbers"!

This is a problem that I've seen repeatedly in trying to help
programmers in other languages get started in Racket.  Lots of people
want to know "how it all works" right when they start.  Whether this
is helpful or not, everyone has some definition of "all" for these
purposes.  Usually it includes the language and libraries, but not the
compiler or processor.  Unfortunately, in Racket it's just the case
that more of the complexity is "above the line" in some sense, and
thus people want an explanation of how it works.

I don't know what to do about this, but it's something I've run into many times.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu