[racket] Typed Racket frustration

On Feb 7, 2015, at 7:35 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> Can you say more about what the best workflow for you would be here?
> Should this information appear in the blue boxes that DrRacket shows,
> or in a tooltip, or somewhere else? Or do you want to have it listed
> in a separate document that you read in the browser? Or something else
> entirely?

My one-person focus group would create entries for each `(inst proc ...)` in the HTML documentation that might look something like this:



Then I would hook these entries into DrRacket so they appear in the upper-right blue box when I hover over `inst` (in lieu of the default '(inst e t ...) (inst e t ... t ooo bound)')



>> 
> I'm not sure what you're imagining the "instantiation-arg-spec" would
> look like. If we add documentation with the types of standard library
> functions, then I think the most useful thing to present is the actual
> type (or perhaps a simplified version in some cases where the type is
> very large). In particular, I don't think that we could describe how
> to instantiate polymorphic types better than by giving the type.

As someone learning TR, I find that the types as printed in the REPL sometimes reveal implementation details that conceal a simpler underlying logic. Take `map`:

- : (All (c a b ...)
      (case->
       (-> (-> a c) (Pairof a (Listof a)) (Pairof c (Listof c)))
       (-> (-> a b ... b c) (Listof a) (Listof b) ... b (Listof c))))

After a little fiddling one discovers that "oh, it's just (inst map output-type input-type ...)". So this is where a documentation entry could add value, because it can explain this underlying logic.
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