From the release notes I see a new 'db' lib has been added which'll work out-of-the-box with PGSQL, MySQL, SQLite and ODBC. No more fetching different PlaneT packages for different databases, plus it has the added benefit of being in the core. Great work by the Racket Team :) lots of batteries included!
Would How to Design Programs (http://www.htdp.org/) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book.
And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things that go bing. There's also GUI REPL tool called Dr. Racket.
I just checked racket out from Git, and it was easy to build and install (on an out-of-date Ubuntu) and they had binaries available too.
I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea of what is important to teach first. SICP deals with more fundamental issues, and is much more worth your time. Although I should point out that I have only read a bit of HTDP, and looked at the table of contents.
SICP is excellent but I'm not sure if it should be the first touch you have to programming. HTDP might be a little more practical and easy to approach. Maybe for a computer scientist, SICP would be fine but for someone who wants to learn a little bit of coding, SICP is overkill.
Also, SICP's examples are intended for people with strong background in maths, etc (what you can expect from a CS student), like the examples on finding square roots or doing symbolic differentiation. Don't get me wrong, though. I personally like these examples a lot but I'm a pretty hard core CS geek.
I would like to give my enthusiastic vote to Racket as I am working through SICP exercises in Dr Racket. I find it very simple to use IDE. It just gets out of your way to perform simple REPL, has separate definitions and console panels. Its debugging feature is fairly intuitive. It also has more advanced features when one is ready for it.
Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use. That list of features is awesome. This, just a few months since they redid all of Racket's graphics library. Well done!
> Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use.
I use Racket to study SICP so I haven't looked into the Racket language at all, but I can give you my impressions about the programming environment. On my netbook running Ubuntu, DrRacket is extremely slow and short keys don't work. I've found how to use the racket interpreter using (enter! "myfile.scm") and how to enable readline support, but it wasn't obvious at first. On my laptop also running Ubuntu, DrRacket is usable but strangely (enter! ...) raises an error. This gives the impression that the whole environment is not well polished. I think it would be useful to have an easy-to-find straightforward tutorial on how to use Racket with any editor and the text-based REPL, as many people are probably not keen on using DrRacket.
This is not a criticism or even an opinion but merely a feeling I'm expressing here, I'm sure I could (and will) address all these issues with more RTFM.
Just a quick note: enter! doesn't really make sense in DrRacket. When you evaluate your code in DrRacket it does the equivalent of an enter! for you. If you want help drop into #racket. I'll be there in a couple of hours.
Oh I don't know, it's not completely obscure. Tools like DrRacket need a community to exist, they don't come from nowhere. It's used at a reasonable number of schools, and even has a book about interpreters written with it (by Shriram Krishnamurthi).
Now if you're asking why it hasn't replaces Scheme, I personally think it's (1) because Racket is yet-another-lisp-derivative, (2) because adding objects to lisp is like a rite of passage for lisp programmers, which trivializes many (cool) features in racket, and (3) because it's hard to convince old-school lispers of anything, let alone that their dialect is wrong, or needs improvement.
Does anyone know of a few good examples of using Racket's GUI and drawing/canvas library? I took a look at it a few weeks ago, in the hopes of coming up with a portable way to do simple graphics examples, such as turtles and life and drawing character, but it felt like it would take a lot of study to get anything working. (I've done more curses than Tk, and more Tk than Swing, and not much else.)
