[racket] Blog post about Racket

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 10:18:47AM -0400, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 
> On May 12, 2014, at 3:56 AM, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen at fastmail.net> wrote:
> 
> > Note however that I didn't look at performance, which is not
> > really important for most of what I do.
> 
> 
> In hindsight that is obvious from your use of Python :-) It should
> have clicked in me, but I am just so used to think "scientific 
> computation ~ simulations of nuclear bombs, aircraft wings, oil
> platforms, and such" and that's when performance is the overriding 
> concern. 
> 
> 
> > I agree that the term "macro" should be banned, but I don't think I
> > can contribute much to that.
> 
> 
> You can, and everyone else on this list can: 
> 
>  do not use the word 'macro' ever again. 
> 
> Period. 
> 
> 
> > ... my point about the roots of the languages in academic research 
> > is valid nevertheless. I'd like to see more of this.
> 
> 
> You are absolutely correct and we should emphasize this idea 
> on our web pages a lot more. 
> 
> 
> > Making languages with different garbage
> > collectors work together is such a pain that I am not very motivated
> > to try. I guess this problem will ensure the survival of C for many
> > years to come.
> 
> 
> A student of mine tried twice to integrate Python with Racket 
> some 10, 12 years ago. Painful indeed, and your conclusion is 
> correct. 

The world needs a good, flexible, exact garbage collector that can be 
used by a variety of languages.  Ideally, its interface to the rest of 
the world should admit of implementations that are just 
stop-and-collect, or stop-and-copy, or multicore for speed, or 
even concurrent with the mutator.


And then all those languages can share it.
 
-- hendrik