Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much and not able to put my finger on why. It's not even top 10 languages or top 5 lisps for me but it is just incredibly practical. I have zero passion for this language.

The way I use racket its main competitor is python. It's for when I want to accomplish something with heavy third party deps, and I have zero interest in writing the actual cool code I just need to make some libraries kiss and then use my tool. Not saying that's the case here but maybe racket just doesn't offer you much that python doesn't?

Sounds like you'd get more from just using one of the other lisps you liked, especially if there's a more specialized one that wouldn't be competing with a language you probably would prefer to use anyway. Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel.

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piloto_ciego 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This is something to think about... and you know, the other side of it is, "maybe I should play with Rhombus but also just spend some time playing more in Racket and choose to like it more?" lol - we can do that right? Choose to enjoy things?

One of the things I've really wanted to get into is writing some DSLs and Racket and Rhombus are supposed to be the tools you're supposed to reach for for that?

I don't know, the god's honest truth is that I don't write nearly as much code as I did 8 months ago lol, so maybe just diving into Racket and Rhombus for personal stuff would be fun and it doesn't have to something for work...

Really, the lisps I've really liked are Guile Scheme (ok not a lisp really but lispy enough and I liked it) and Clojure? But though I liked them I never had enough work in them to get really good. I do like Lispy languages in general though (since Emacs Lisp, which is glorious in it's own way), I just need the excuse to start playing with them more because they're fun.

You know what I've been really intrigued with over the years has been uLisp (which should be pronounced Micro Lisp) for microcontrollers (http://www.ulisp.com/), but a really cool project would be a DSL that spits out C for the STM32 boards I play with periodically for embedded stuff? I don't know, maybe after I get the cabin done... that'd be a really fun adventure and writing a DSL for that would make my life immensely easier...

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alethic 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Racket and Rhombus are nice for writing embedded DSLs, yeah. More generally, they're nice for writing macros. Scheme in general is nice for writing macros with its `syntax-case` and first-class notions of syntax objects, but Racket is /really/ nice with its `syntax-parse` and explicit notions of phase levels... If you are interested in learning, Greg Hendershott's "Fear of Macros" is often recommended as a good introduction. https://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/

	▲	piloto_ciego 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am interested, thanks! I was reading through "Let Over Lambda" and kind of out of my depth because while I can mostly figure out what's going on I'm not using CL as a daily driver so the book just references functions and I'm like, "well I guess do-thing-nicely, does the thing nicely? Alright, good enough I suppose." Maybe I should really give things another go with it. Thanks!