Racket News - Issue 4

Permalink: https://racket-news.com/2019/03/racket-news-issue-4.html

Welcome to the fourth issue of Racket News. If there’s something you really dislike, or something you want to see added to the newsletter please send me an email or submit an issue.

Jesse Alama has suggested I should try to add a table of contents to this week’s issue - thanks for the suggestion. Again, let me reinforce the idea that I would love to have more contributions. If you see something that would like featured (blog post, mailing list post, news item, video, project, library, etc) just submit it and I will make sure it will be featured in the next issue. If there is a way I can facilitate contributions send me an email. I am worried that without contributions the newsletter becomes a biased source of what interests me most, instead of what might be actually relevant for the community. Is it easier to contribute if you just DM me on twitter? Go for it!

Table of Contents

  1. What’s New?
  2. Racket Around the Web
  3. New Releases
  4. Project in the Spotlight
  5. Upcoming Meetups
  6. Help Needed
  7. Racket Project Statistics
  8. Racket Jobs

What’s New?

Racket around the web

Here is a couple of posts I found for this issue, as usual, enjoy!

New Releases

If you know of library releases or maybe your own libraries and you want them to be featured, please let me know.

  • Scribble Coq - William Bowman announced this new scribble library to typoset Coq going as far as running and auto-typesetting Coq examples as done by scribble/example.
  • Scribble Minted - Also by William Bowman, I have missed this announcement on a previous issue, scribble minted supports code rendering using pygmentize.

Project in the Spotlight

The project for this issue is Metapict by Jens Axel-Soegaard. I find this to be one of the most underrated Racket projects I know of. More people should know about it and use it!

From the docs:

The metapict library provides functions and data structures useful for generating picts. The library includes support for points, vectors, Bezier curves, and, general curves.

The algorithm used to calculate a nice curve from points and tangents is the same as the one used in MetaPost.

With this library I to hope narrow the gap between Scribble and LaTeX + MetaPost/Tikz. If you find any features in MetaPost or Tikz that you miss, don’t hesitate to mail me.

Upcoming Meetups

One more week until Bob and RacketFest!

  • Bob2019 - Right before Racketfest, also in Berlin, Germany there will be a few Rackety related things going on like a talk by Shriram Krishnamurthi and a tutorial by Jesse Alama
  • RacketFest - Jesse Alama is organizing the first European Racket Meeting. It will take place in Berlin, Germany on March 23, 2019. Make sure you get your ticket before they sell out… again!
  • Racket School 2019 - taught by Racket heavyweights it’s your time to get you #lang-fu up to scratch. Will take place in Salt Lake City, US on July 8–12.
  • RacketCon 2019 - taking place in Salt Lake City, US on July 13, 14, just after Racket School.

Help Needed

Do you know a project looking for contributors or help with a task? I would love to hear about it.

Racket Project Statistics

Some data about the activity in the Racket repository since the last issue.

Number of master Commits   56
Bugs open   292
PRs open   90

Contributions by (12):

  • Alexander McLin
  • Alexis King
  • Gustavo Massaccesi
  • John Clements
  • Marc Kaufmann
  • Matthew Flatt
  • Matthias Felleisen
  • Paulo Matos
  • Philip McGrath
  • Robby Findler
  • Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
  • yjqww6

Of which, making the list the first time this year (7):

  • Alexander McLin
  • Alexis King
  • John Clements
  • Marc Kaufmann
  • Matthias Felleisen
  • Philip McGrath
  • yjqww6

Jobs

If you want to advertise any Racket related jobs, please send me an email or submit an issue.

Disclaimer

This issue is brought to you by Paulo Matos. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are solely mine and they do not represent the views of the PLT Team, who develop Racket.

I have also tried to survey the most relevant things that happened in Racket lang recently. If you have done something awesome, wrote a blog post or seen something that I missed - my apologies. Let me know so I can rectify it in the next issue.


Contribute

Have you seen something cool related Racket? Send it in and we will feature it in the next issue.