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<br><div><div>On Jan 1, 2012, at 6:14 PM, Racket Noob wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"> For all you dear academic Racket scribomans, here's a lesson from Mark Tarver, the ingenious inventor of a new lisp-like language, Shen (more on that beautiful language can be found here: <a href="http://http://shenlanguage.org">http://http://shenlanguage.org</a>).<br> <br>In his article "Why I am Not a Professor", this clever man says the following:<br> [snipped]<br></div></blockquote><br><div>The only startling things about the passage are (a) that Mr. Tarver seems to believe he's made a new discovery that had escaped everybody else's notice, and (b) that you believe this too.</div><div><br></div><div>Seriously, all of us who are in academia know all that: we put up with the publish-or-perish system and try to find a way to do something constructive despite it. Most of us don't claim to be Mozarts, and claim only to be making incremental progress in our own corners of human knowledge, so it's no great revelation that we're not all Mozarts. Some pieces of progress (like Racket) are more applicable to the real world than others (like my own dissertation, on function-algebraic characterizations of parallel computational complexity classes).</div></div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr">Reading the above lines, I was very much reminded of the hundreds of PLT academic papers which correspond quite closely with the above Tarver's description. :) What do you say to this, Neil? And the rest of PLT?</div></blockquote><div><br></div>"What do you say to this?" can only be read as an attempt to prod people into defending themselves, and/or attacking you. Neither of which is the purpose of this list. We're here to discuss how to use this really cool tool to solve real problems, and come up with ways to make the tool even cooler than it already is. One way to do the latter is to improve the documentation, and if you have constructive suggestions on how to do so ("this sucks" is not constructive), I have no doubt those suggestions will be taken gratefully. If you have real and important problems to solve, more important or more novel than what we've addressed in our various academic papers, we'd love to hear about them, and will cheerfully provide suggestions on how (and whether) to use Racket to solve them. If all you have are insults and argument-mongering, please go away.</div><div><br></div><br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>Stephen Bloch</div><div><a href="mailto:sbloch@adelphi.edu">sbloch@adelphi.edu</a></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>