[racket] article about Racket

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
> The Racket book I am writing will emphasize the everyday "small DSLs for big
> wins".  I'll also suggest "pervasive local DSLs" as an optional practice of
> style,  And finally suggest when "#lang" can be a big win (e.g.,
> all-encompassing DSLs, non-programmer programmers, legacy code, language
> research).  There's useful places for all these kinds of DSLs, and the wins
> can be so big that we shouldn't say, "DSLs are difficult to do well, and we
> don't already know how to do DSLs well, so let's not learn anything new, and
> instead let's type tons of unmaintainable Java every day and drink ourselves
> to sleep every night."

i will be sure to get and read the book. i don't want to be the blub
java programmer, i would like to wrangle dsls too. i've just not had
the time and motivation to make the time to learn it, and when i've
been involved with them as a consumer they've been frustrating mostly.
even a "real" language is frustrating, let alone one cobbled together
by a non-PLT (in the wider PLT sense) person.

so i do like the idea of small dsls. maybe the point that racket lets
you use small dsls with the same data somehow ameliorates or cuts off
the path that most things go down of being a crappy reimplementation
of half of lisp. (or javascript, sorta, sometimes. or whatever else.)

sincerely.