Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

I have an on again off again relationship with LISP. I _loved_ scheme in college. I went to a college where java was predominately taught, but after my second year I rolled my dice with every professor to let me do assignments in scheme. A few went for it. It just clicked, and I felt like I could build anything.

After college, I didn't use any Lisps for a long time. I tried to get back to it. I tried installing common lisp. I remember the installation process being kind of insane. It felt like I was installing an operating system. The dev ergonomics were weird. I couldn't get it to click again like it did in college.

I messed with (fluxus) for a while. I LOVE live coding stuff, and it treating oGL as a first class standard library is so cool. It seemed like a single guy's passion project. It lacked some facilities that made it click as a daily driver. Also, installing it on my mac was a colossal pain in the ass due to pulse audio issues.

Not too long ago I installed racket. The installation process was painless, and I wrote enough with it that I started to feel that magic again... but then.. I .. wrote too much?

DrRacket was nice when I started, I like images appearing in the REPL. It quickly revealed itself to be hot steaming garbage. SCROLLING is so slow and flickery in a 225~ line source I wrote that it's beyond distracting.

I tried to play around with perlin noise, and generating an image of regular sizes required me to click this alert doubling Dr.Racket's ram allowance like 3 times. I'm sure that's my code's fault, but I'm probably not sticking with it long enough to find out..

I'll try again in a few years I guess.

I vaguely recall DrRacket had a scrolling repaint performance bug on OS X within the last year or so. If whatever problem you saw is not already fixed, you might file a bug report on it.

Anyway, DrRacket is mainly an educational IDE, for students who've possibly never written a line of code before. You could see its defaulting to memory-limiting sandboxing as a good thing for intro programming students. (I usually use Emacs, though I do sometimes use DrRacket, for quick tasks, and when I want to use the Macro Stepper.)

I don't know whether the new-ish Jupyter kernel for Racket supports images, but that might be something to look at.

There are also several other good Scheme implementations/variants. Racket has been my favorite, but I'm moving back to building atop RnRS, as unpaid time permits.

Have you given Clojure a try?

I am a heavy Emacs user, so I need to occasionally write emacs-lisp. The other lisp I use from time to time is Fennel. Clojure I use at work. I have to say: having to use other lisps makes you appreciate how incredibly nice Clojure is. I think every programmer at least should try Clojure.

I've been obsessed with Clojure for a while, but seriously struggle finding a job where I can use it professionally. How'd you manage that? Any tips?

When was the last time you've tried? There's plenty of Clojure jobs today. Many Clojure companies (if not the most) are willing to hire remote. Clojure is steadily growing. Clojure conferences popping around the globe - Clojure/South, Clojure/North, Heart Of Clojure, ClojureTRE, Dutch Clojure Days, ClojureX (it feels like every European country has its own Clojure conf now).

I've been using Clojure for almost four years - switched three different jobs, never had a problem with finding a Clojure gig.

There are #jobs and #jobs-discuss channels on Clojurians Slack, watch those, some good job postings happen there.

Yes.

https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

https://clojure.org/community/companies

Hope that helps!

If your manager trusts you, and the organization is structured to support it, you occasionally get the chance to write a project in your language of choice. Be sure that you’re thoroughly proficient with the language, runtime, and tooling before trying to introduce it though.

I haven't. I've been prejudiced against the jvm for most of my career (mostly because of how heinously Oracle has treated Sun's corpse). I'm over it now.

Thanks for reminding me to consider it.

I'll look at it today.

It reminds me of a real world Scheme. Not identical, but similar.

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