any time the topic of racket comes up, i wonder if there are any interesting apps i could explore. but all i find is libraries and dev tools: https://awesome-racket.com/
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the time, was that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages as the interface.
A lot of people could have been having this idea at the same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was the first Web-based application. It seemed such a novel idea to us that we named the company after it: Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web, instead of running on your desktop computer.
Another unusual thing about this software was that it was written primarily in a programming language called Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs. ...
At the heart of Spritely is Goblins, its distributed object programming environment. Goblins provides an intuitive security model, automatic local transactions for locally synchronous operations, and an easy to use and efficient asynchronous programming interface for encapsulated objects which can live anywhere on the network. Its networking model abstracts away these details so the programmer can focus on object programming rather than protocol architecture.
Goblins also integrates powerful distributed debugging tools, and a process persistence and upgrade model which respects its security fundamentals.
Are you suggesting, possibly, that a team of 10x Lisp hackers with 10x agent force multipliers could catch up with the depth and bread of Python's CheeseShop and proceed to right the world?
The co-creator of Scheme is also co-author of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[0]. Namely, Gerald Jay Sussman[1], the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In teaching our material we use a dialect of the programming language Lisp. We never formally teach the language, because we don’t have to. We just use it, and students pick it up in a few days. This is one great advantage of Lisp-like languages: They have very few ways of forming compound expressions, and almost no syntactic structure. All of the formal properties can be covered in an hour, like the rules of chess. After a short time we forget about syntactic details of the language (because there are none) and get on with the real issues—figuring out what we want to compute, how we will decompose problems into manageable parts, and how we will work on the parts. Another advantage of Lisp is that it supports (but does not enforce) more of the large-scale strategies for modular decomposition of programs than any other language we know. We can make procedural and data abstractions, we can use higher-order functions to capture common patterns of usage, we can model local state using assignment and data mutation, we can link parts of a program with streams and delayed evaluation, and we can easily implement embedded languages. All of this is embedded in an interactive environment with excellent support for incremental program design, construction, testing, and debugging. We thank all the generations of Lisp wizards, starting with John McCarthy, who have fashioned a fine tool of unprecedented power and elegance.
We used it in the course I had that introduced functional programming. The only memorable thing I can remember writing in it for that class was a topological sort (I believe).
