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

These are great points to make to the wider community. 
Keep spreading them. As I am reading published books on 
other scripting languages (say Clojure), I am beginning 
to see that it's all about having a PL Kitsch [*] literature
in your eco-system. And it has to start from just such stories, 
told over and over to various groups. -- Matthias

[*] Kitsch literature is easily recognizable by overuse of
positive adjectives and adverbs. As many of you know, it is
the most widely sold and read form of literature, and I am
making this statement here not in the American sense of the 
word (art objects in bad taste) but the Germanic reference 
to a genre of writing (also bad for people who like to think). 



On Feb 16, 2012, at 7:46 PM, Harry Spier wrote:

> 
> 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