Welcome to the twenty-fifth issue of Racket News.

Happy First Birthday to Racket News which is now 1 year old. Our first issue was February 1, 2019.

Racket 7.6 should be out of the door soon, but for some reason it always happens after I just press the Publish button - so no announcement yet but who knows, maybe you’ll be able to get your hands on this release in a couple of hours.

Grab a piece of virtual cake, sit down, sing happy birthday and have a coffee. Enjoy!

Table of Contents

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

What’s New?

• RacketFest is almost here - taking place Feb. 27 in Berlin. Jesse recently send a Call for Participation.
• Jack Firth keeps hacking on his great rebellion library. Just recently he announced some big updates. If you develop Racket in any serious way, you need to check this library out!
• Eric Dodd has requested some support, on the mailing list, to port Racket to IRIX. If you own an IRIX machine, testing the build process and sending feedback to the mailing list would be a great way to help.
• FOSDEM just finished and Racket was involved once again. Jérôme Martin presented Making poetry with Racket - stay tuned, videos should be soon online.

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

• Announcing Try Racket by Bogdan Popa.
• Time travel debugging in Spritely Goblins, previewed through Terminal Phase by Christopher Lemmer Webber.
• https://dedbox.github.io/2020/01/documentation-as-a-creative-force.html by Eric Griffis.
• It’s Kinda FRP-y by Sage Gerard.

New Releases

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

• kinda-ferpy(src/pkg) by Sage Gerard.

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is Polyglot by Sage Gerard.

From the website:

I designed Polyglot to address my own common pains after many years of switching platforms, frameworks, or libraries to develop websites. Each switch often made me learn the next trendy rephrasal of basic concepts and tasks. I can’t make a new tool without being a part of that problem, so why should you use anything I make in an already saturated space?

For one thing, if you want to change how you work on a website when neck deep with Polyglot, you can do so without rewriting all of your code. Unlike Scribble or Pollen, Polyglot views documents as containers of programs where any block of code is subject to rules you can change.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is Scribble: closing the book on ad hoc documentation tools by Matthew Flatt, Eli Barzilay, and Robert Bruce Findler.

Abstract:

Scribble is a system for writing library documentation, user guides, and tutorials. It builds on PLT Scheme’s technology for language extension, and at its heart is a new approach to connecting prose references with library bindings. Besides the base system, we have built Scribble libraries for JavaDoc-style API documentation, literate programming, and conference papers. We have used Scribble to produce thousands of pages of documentation for PLT Scheme; the new documentation is more complete, more accessible, and better organized, thanks in large part to Scribble’s flexibility and the ease with which we cross-reference information across levels. This paper reports on the use of Scribble and on its design as both an extension and an extensible part of PLT Scheme.

Upcoming Meetups

Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.

• RacketFest 2020: organised by Jesse Alama and taking place in Berlin, Germany on February 27, 2020.
• RacketCon 2020, shall be soon announced for the Fall of 2020 celebrating a quarter century of Racket.

Racket Project Statistics

Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of January, 2020.

Contributions by (18):

• Alexis King
• Brian Wignall
• David Florness
• Dominik Pantůček
• Fred Fu
• Greg Hendershott
• Gustavo Massaccesi
• Jack Firth
• John Clements
• KDr2
• Matthew Flatt
• Paulo Matos
• Philip McGrath
• Robby Findler
• Ryan Culpepper
• Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
• Syntacticlosure
• Tommy McHugh

Repositories included above are: racket, ChezScheme, redex, typed-racket, drracket, scribble, plot.

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.