[racket] "lab notebook on learning process"

From: Artyom Kazak (yom at artyom.me)
Date: Mon May 5 14:14:17 EDT 2014

 > fellow i-wish-racket-was-as-awesome-as-haskell-ian

But, but I'm not!..

 > The issues you have with for/and, etc. is a fundamental issue with strict
 > evaluation vs. either lazy evaluation or no evaluation (macros). One
 > cannot correctly short circuit out of a loop that's already preprocessed
 > every possible result!

I don't have issues with `for/and`; moreover, I do not wish for Racket to be
lazy by default, or uber-functional, or dependently typed, or anything else
which Haskell or another language is. I understand the tradeoffs. What I
don't understand is why I seem to be expected to start a discussion about
those tradeoffs when I simply want to say “here's when lack of laziness
bites”. I don't intend to make any judgements, and it's a pity that people
still see them whenever I say anything more emotional than “it is how it 
is”.

 > Lastly, without meaning to be rude, as it's coming from the point of view
 > of someone who's had similar issues, there's a degree of RTFM present...

I'll include this whole paragraph verbatim as a disclaimer for the whole
series, if you don't mind (even tho it's a bit upsetting to see you telling
me all these obvious things as if there was a chance that I think
documentation writers are at fault for my misunderstandings and mistakes, or
that I think some of the perceived issues I have with Racket are due to it
being stupid, or that I want it to be a Haskell clone, or that I'm trying to
learn it a why-isn't-it-Haskell-Racket).

 > And thank god, because it would take 15 minutes to insert an impure debug
 > statement.

As per customs and traditions of Internet White Knights, I feel obliged to
reply that there's Debug.Trace module which makes it a considerably easier
task (and it's the second result when googling “haskell debug”, too).

 > By the way, speed is improved when using the "racket" command-line 
command
 > as opposed to running in DrRacket for whatever reason, especially when
 > using big numbers, by an astounding amount sometimes. I myself recently
 > learned that...

Thanks, noted. (I updated the post.)

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