Welcome to the forty second issue of Racket News.
Another week - or two - another issue. Stephen De Gabrielle and Sam Phillips are organising a Racket Users video meetup. Galois is using Racket - Yes! And Bodgan Popa is working on Wasm tooling for Racket. The Racket world doesn’t stop spinning. Check it all out in more detail below.
Stay safe - grab an espresso and enjoy!
Table of Contents
- What’s New?
- Racket Around the Web
- New Releases
- Call to Racket!
- Project in the Spotlight
- Featured Racket Paper
- Upcoming Meetups
What’s New?
- Stephen De Gabrielle and Sam Phillips are organising a Racket Users Video Meetup in Gather (the same awesome platform used for RacketCon). The first one will take place November 28 at 11am PT (or 8pm CET). You’ll need Chrome or Firefox as Safari apparently doesn’t work.
- Agenda:
- Lightning talks (< 5mins) - What have you been working on? (optional).
- Paper for discussion (see featured paper): “Adding Interactive Visual Syntax to Textual Code” by Leif Andersen, (OOPSLA 2020).
- Agree date for next meet-up (every 6–12 weeks?).
- Ubuntu PPA is now updated to Racket 7.9 - thanks to Asumu Takikawa.
- Galois is using Racket commercially - yes, you heard that right. Their main use of Racket is through Rosette. Take a look at their blog post which has more information.
- Dominik Pantůček has announced RCGE, a racket CPU Graphics Engine. It looks pretty cool - check it out.
Racket around the web
Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!
- Discovering and Mitigating Emergent Computations With Innovative Program Synthesis by Jennifer Paykin and Scott Moore.
- Racketeering Gophers by Bogdan Popa.
New Releases
If you know of library releases or maybe your own libraries and you want them to be featured, please let me know.
wasm-lib(pkg/src) is a Wasm tooling package for Racket by Bogdan Popa.global(pkg/src) is a library to define globals and automatically generate a command line parser for it by Laurent Orseau.
Call to Racket!
Want to contribute to Racket? Don’t know where to start? Each RN issue I choose an easy issue to fix to get you started contributing to Racket. Come, give it a go.
For this issue, we renew our call on volunteers to fix issue 813 of Typed Racket. If you are interested in fixing this but need some guidance, feel free to comment on the issue page. Will you be our next Champion?
Good luck!
Project in the Spotlight
This week’s project in the spotlight is Koyo by Bogdan Popa.
From the website:
koyo is a web application development toolkit that expands upon Racket’s built-in web-server with all the functionality that a web app typically needs in a complete package.
Don’t miss the related video.
Featured Racket Paper
This issue’s featured paper is Adding Interactive Visual Syntax to Textual Code by Leif Andersen, Michael Ballantyne, and Matthias Felleisen.
Abstract:
Many programming problems call for turning geometrical thoughts into code: tables, hierarchical structures, nests of objects, trees, forests, graphs, and so on. Linear text does not do justice to such thoughts. But, it has been the dominant programming medium for the past and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This paper proposes a novel mechanism for conveniently extending textual programming languages with problem-specific visual syntax. It argues the necessity of this language feature, demonstrates the feasibility with a robust prototype, and sketches a design plan for adapting the idea to other languages.
Make sure you check the related video as well.
Upcoming Meetups
Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.
- November 28, 2020 at 8pm CET / 11am PT: Racket users Video Meetup in Gather.
Contributors
Thanks to
- 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.