Welcome to the thirty-first issue of Racket News.

This is another full-to-the-brim Racket News! Lots of things are happening all around the Racket community, and slowly I am struggling to keep up-to-date. If I have forgotten something, let me know and I will publish it in the next edition.

Lets get going, grab an espresso and 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. Jobs

What’s New?

• The European Lisp Symposium 2020 took place online this year and it was quite a success. The videos are online and include a keynote talk from Andy Keep on the Nanopass Compiler.
  • The success of this year’s virtual ELS prompted the creation of an Online Lisp Series. Stay tuned - there’s a mailing list!
• Joel Dueck started a newsletter called Pollen Time where he notifies subscribers about online events focused on pollen education and collaboration.
• Our own Robby Findler will be giving a talk on “Concolic Testing with Higher-Order Inputs” for the Chalmers Online Functional Programming seminar series on June 15th. This will be streamed online and an edited video posted later on their Youtube channel.
• Due to the current worldwide situation, Racket Summer School was cancelled for 2020.

Edit (2020.05.19): Added item on the Online Lisp Meeting Series.

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

• Racket is 25 by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt.
• Using GitHub Actions to Test Racket Code (Revised) by Bogdan Popa.
• Continuations in Racket’s Web Server by Bogdan Popa.
• ASCII progress bar in Chez Scheme by Travis Hinkelman.
• Forrest Smith’s Fuzzy Search, in Racket by Sage Gerard.
• Announcing a Baby CSS3 Parser in Racket by Sage Gerard.
• A Review of the Racket Programming Language 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.

• rs(src/pkg) is a live coding tool that lets you sequence MIDI using Racket.
• fuzzy-search(src/pkg) is a library that provides approximate string matching procedures loosely based on Sublime Text’s approach.
• planning(src/pkg) is a library for automated planning.
• chido-parse(src/pkg) is an expressive, extensible, and composable parsing system.
• smtp(src/pkg) is a practical library to send emails using the SMTP protocol.
• rival(src/pkg) is an interval arithmetic library for Racket, intended for real computation.

Edit (2020.05.19): Fixed link and blurbs to fuzzy-search and planning package. Thanks to Robert O’Callahan and Chris Matheson for pointing this out to me.

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is Disposable (src/pkg) by Jack Firth.

From the website:

This library defines disposables, composable first-class producers of values with associated external resources that must be allocated and deallocated such as database connections. Several safe abstractions are provided to consume disposable values while ensuring their associated resources are deallocated after use.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is Bithoven - Gödel Encoding of Chamber Music and Functional 8-Bit Audio Synthesis by Jay McCarthy.

Abstract:

Bithoven is a prolific composer of approximately 1.079363 * 10^239 different compositions based on four-part harmony and basic chord progressions. It is combined with a purely functional audio synthesis engine based on the Ricoh RP2A03, found in the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The synthesis engine is parameterized over a band of instruments and styles of play, so each composition can be played in one of approximately 4.22234 * 10^41 different arrangements or “NEStrations”.

Upcoming Meetups

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

• RacketCon 2020, was supposed to be announced for the fall of 2020 but there are no official news about it yet.

Jobs

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

Contributors

Thanks to

• Chris Matheson
• Jesse Alama
• Robert O’Callahan
• Stephen De Gabrielle

for their contributions to this 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.