dustycloud/posts/racket-is-an-acceptable-python.md

title: Racket is an acceptable Python date: 2019-07-09 09:27 author: Christine Lemmer-Webber tags: racket, lisp, python, foss

slug: racket-is-an-acceptable-python

A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp. Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers. Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed unattainable for anything aimed for production since the AI Winter shattered Lisp's popularity in the 80s/early 90s. If you can't get Lisp, what's closest thing you can get?

This was around the time I was starting to program; I had spent some time configuring my editor with Emacs Lisp and loved every moment I got to do it; I read some Lisp books and longed for more. And yet when I tried to "get things done" in the language, I just couldn't make as much headway as I could with my preferred language for practical projects at the time: Python.

Python was great... mostly. It was easy to read, it was easy to write, it was easy-ish to teach to newcomers. (Python's intro material is better than most, but my spouse has talked before about some major pitfalls that the Python documentation has which make getting started unnecessarily hard. You can hear her talk about that at this talk we co-presented on at last year's RacketCon.) I ran a large free software project on a Python codebase, and it was easy to get new contributors; the barrier to entry to becoming a programmer with Python was low. I consider that to be a feature, and it certainly helped me bootstrap my career.

Most importantly of all though, Python was easy to pick up and run with because no matter what you wanted to do, either the tools came built in or the Python ecosystem had enough of the pieces nearby that building what you wanted was usually fairly trivial.

But Python has its limitations, and I always longed for a lisp. For a brief time, I thought I could get there by contributing to the Hy project, which was a lisp that transformed itself into the Python AST. "Why write Python in a syntax that's easy to read when you could add a bunch of parentheses to it instead?" I would joke when I talked about it. Believe it or not though, I do consider lisps easier to read, once you are comfortable to understand their syntax. I certainly find them easier to write and modify. And I longed for the metaprogramming aspects of Lisp.

Alas, Hy didn't really reach my dream. That macro expansion made debugging a nightmare as Hy would lose track of where the line numbers are; it wasn't until that when I really realized that without line numbers, you're just lost in terms of debugging in Python-land. That and Python didn't really have the right primitives; immutable datastructures for whatever reason never became first class, meaning that functional programming was hard, "cons" didn't really exist (actually this doesn't matter as much as people might think), recursive programming isn't really as possible without tail call elimination, etc etc etc.

But I missed parentheses. I longed for parentheses. I dreamed in parentheses. I'm not kidding, the only dreams I've ever had in code were in lisp, and it's happened multiple times, programs unfolding before me. The structure of lisp makes the flow of code so clear, and there's simply nothing like the comfort of developing in front of a lisp REPL.

Yet to choose to use a lisp seemed to mean opening myself up to eternal yak-shaving of developing packages that were already available on the Python Package Index or limiting my development community an elite group of Emacs users. When I was in Python, I longed for the beauty of a Lisp; when I was in a Lisp, I longed for the ease of Python.

All this changed when I discovered Racket:

• Racket comes with a full-featured editor named DrRacket built-in that's damn nice to use. It has all the features that make lisp hacking comfortable previously mostly only to Emacs users: parenthesis balancing, comfortable REPL integration, etc etc. But if you want to use Emacs, you can use racket-mode. Win-win.
• Racket has intentionally been built as an educational language, not unlike Python. One of the core audiences of Racket is middle schoolers, and it even comes with a built-in game engine for kids. (The How to Design Programs prologue might give you an introductory taste, and Realm of Racket is a good book all about learning to program by building Racket games.)
• My spouse and I even taught classes about how to learn to program for humanities academics using Racket. We found the age-old belief that "lisp syntax is just too hard" is simply false; the main thing that most people lack is decent lisp-friendly tooling with a low barrier to entry, and DrRacket provides that. The only people who were afraid of the parentheses turned out to be people who already knew how to program. Those who didn't even praised the syntax for its clarity and the way the editor could help show you when you made a syntax error (DrRacket is very good at that). "Lisp is too hard to learn" is a lie; if middle schoolers can learn it, so can more seasoned programmers.
• Racket might even be more batteries included than Python. At least all the batteries that come included are generally nicer; Racket's GUI library is the only time I've ever had fun in my life writing GUI programs (and they're cross platform too). Constructing pictures with its pict library is a delight. Plotting graphs with plot is an incredible experience. Writing documentation with Scribble is the best non-org-mode experience I've ever had, but has the advantage over org-mode in that your document is just inverted code. I could go on. And these are just some packages bundled with Racket; the Package repository contains much more.
• Racket's documentation is, in my experience, unparalleled. The Racket Guide walks you through all the key concepts, and the Racket Reference has everything else you need.
• The tutorials are also wonderful; the introductory tutorial gets your feet wet not through composing numbers or strings but by building up pictures. Want to learn more? The next two tutorials show you how to build web applications and then build your own web server.
• Like Python, even though Racket has its roots in education, it is more than ready for serious practical use. These days, when I want to build something and get it done quickly and efficiently, I reach for Racket first.

Racket is a great Lisp, but it's also an acceptable Python. Sometimes you really can have it all.