[racket] Racket 6.0 does not work

Excellent post! I fully agree.

-- 
Manfred

On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 01:30:01 +0000
Matthew Eric Bassett <mebassett at gegn.net> wrote:

> On 03/05/2014 09:03 PM, Junia Magellan wrote:
> > I would like you to understand that most people are not PhD in
> > Computer Science. 90% of people want to run out of the box
> > applications. Even programmers don't have in depth knowledge about
> > the workings of computers and operating systems. I don't know why
> > Racket 6.0 needs libc.so.6, or GLIBC_2.14. I just want to run
> > statistics programs written in Racket from an Internet page.
> Hi Junia,
> 
> I'm not a racket dev, indeed, I've not even downloaded Racket 6.0.  I
> am a heavy user of racket.  In fact, I several people in my company 
> (NBCUniversal) use racket nearly every day.  These aren't PhD's in 
> computer science - these are finance managers, marketers, and sales 
> people who never use anything other than excel, outlook, and ie...and 
> well, now, racket.  Albeit version 5.3.6.
> 
> The racket devs work very hard (for free, too), and they put out an 
> excellent product.  DrRacket is a superb ide, and the racket language 
> (and its language-building libraries) are superb tools for multiple 
> environments.  They, in fact, do work out of the box for those who 
> aren't expecting to be able to compile from source.
> 
> Racket 6.0 has some pretty big changes, and the errors you're
> reporting are a bit a fluke.  To be fair, I don't know anyone who has
> had a pain-free conversion from python 2 to python 3, either.
> 
> It's great of you to report the errors and your build environment,
> and to help the community iron out the issues with the 6.0 branch.
> But the condescending lecture doesn't help.  The Racket devs "get it".
> 
> I felt a need to defend them, and [more importantly] also to
> encourage you to keep using racket (we use v5.3.6, which you noted
> compiles fine out of the box.  and the binaries work great, too).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Matthew Eric
>