[racket] To talk about Racket or not to talk about Racket (was Racket consultants)

Neil Van Dyck wrote:
>...There is little upside to advertising that you're using a not-currently-mainstream platform,
>even if your business itself is not secret. For now,
>"The first rule of Racket Club is: don't talk about Racket Club."

As an old imperative style programmer come to Racket it surprises me
that Racket hasn't become immensely more popular than it is (in the
same way that Ruby has) .  It surprises me that it isn't more
widespread and popular because development in Racket seems a little
easier, a little simpler and a little cleaner, Not just the functional
jprogramming features and macros and first class functions etc.etc.
but all those mundane things you need to do in a development project
seem a little easier.  There is less background noise.

To give some relatively trivial examples (but the kind of thing
developers in the real world do all the time):

In Python to access the Win32 api you need to install the third party
package win32api and for each update of Python a new version of
win32api is needed.  In Racket you simply have the "system" command or
for my needs the "shell-execute" command.  No third party package is
required and there are no issues when Racket goes to the next version.

In Ruby to interface to imagemagick I needed to install a Ruby gem
Rmagick which is Ruby version specific and then set some environmental
variables.  In Racket I just took the old FFI and put the names of the
Imagemagick dlls in it and everything worked like a charm and I'm not
effected  when Racket upgrades or imagemagick upgrades (as long as the
name of the dll doesn't change).

I'm wasting much less time in Racket getting all this background stuff
up and running.

So to me it seems only a matter of time till programmers discover that
Racket is "programmer and developer friendly" and it becomes
mainstream the way Ruby has (if for no other reason than its so much
faster than Ruby).

When I tell other programmers that I'm doing my project in Racket I do
get a kind of blank stare back, but it seems to me, that the more
developers say they are developing in Racket, the sooner it will go
mainstream.

Harry Spier