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<DIV>If we want Racket to become used by more people in industry I think we
should include more information that addresses the misconceptions of many
imperative style programmers in industry that may push them away from developing
in Racket. Information that emphasizes why Racket is “practical”. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>When I talk to my programmer friends who work in industry and who
typically use c#, c++, java etc. there are certain misconceptions that keep
coming up.</DIV>
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<DIV>1) All scripting languages are slow (and pretty much the same kind of like
PERL).</DIV>
<DIV>2) LISP and all LISP dialects (including SCHEME) are used by Academics for
playing around with artificial intelligence and are totally impractical for
programming in the “real world”.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>To speak to this audience I would emphasize that Racket was designed to be
practical.</DIV>
<DIV>1) The module system makes large development projects easy to organise and
trivial to resolve any naming conflicts.</DIV>
<DIV>2) Its “fast”. I think someone just posted that Racket should be 10
times faster than python. Tight loops are only 2 to 3 times slower than in
C. </DIV>
<DIV>3) The FFI lets you interface to other packages and most importantly if
Racket changes its version or the package you are interfacing changes its
version the interface to the foreign package still works. In my experience
this was a problem with using for example Ruby to imagemagick and Python to its
windows tools third party package.</DIV>
<DIV>4) You have “unsafe operations” that allow you to do unsafe things if you
need to. But they are labelled as unsafe.</DIV>
<DIV>5) Because it is a fully bracketed language it is much easier to learn than
unbracketed languages. You don’t have to remember operater precedence
rules. You don’t have to remember “Does this language use “;” at the end
of the line or not? There is almost no syntax you need to learn.</DIV>
<DIV>6) The IDE is extremely simple to learn and use and is linked to the
documentation and has a built in debugger. You can learn it in half an
hour.</DIV>
<DIV>7) It has extensive libraries (this is mentioned)</DIV>
<DIV>8) What other language lets you ask questions on its mailing list to the
language developers.</DIV>
<DIV>9) MOST IMPORTANTLY all these factors greatly reduce debugging time.
Before Racket I would typically spend 25% of my time developing and 75%
debugging. Now with Racket I typically spend 75% of my time
developing and only 25% debuging.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Harry Spier</DIV>
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