For the curious, there is an official YouTube channel with the previous editions https://www.youtube.com/@racketlang/playlists (It usually take a few months until the videos are edited and uploaded.)
behnamoh 20 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: RacketCon Is Saturday
I'm curious: does anyone really care about Racket anymore? In general, does anyone really care about esoteric languages anymore?
With AI, we have converged on a set of languages. For the web, it's JavaScript or TypeScript. For backend, it's Go and Rust. Pretty much nothing else can get picked by AI if you start a new project. If you even like a language like Elixir, there seems to be less and less incentive to use it in production when AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed of Elixir.
I'm saying this as someone who is designing a programming language, and for me, it's just a lot of fun, but I also know I should not hope for my language to take off anytime soon.
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I think the Lisp family of languages are still the productivity boost they always were, especially with a good REPL. They can be as fast and safe as Rust and more expressive than JavaScript doing front end work. The deep support for macros and more really let you mold a program to fit the problem domain. Frontier models are reported to work as effectively with Lisp as any other language, and you can have much more succinct (token efficient) code while having more meaningful abstractions for readability by humans. I expect the two should go very well together. Plus you're dealing with a single language without the complexity of something like Rust or inconsistencies of JavaScript.
Also, I wish your comment wasn't downvoted to oblivion. I'd hope there are other useful responses that people won't be able to view.
LLMs are able to write racket. I have a fairly large project I've been vibecoding for the last 6 months. Models predating deepseek flash 0731 used to make paren mistakes and had a hard time. But now Opus 5.5 for example does not make any mistake writing clear racket code.
To add to this, I definitely wouldn't say we've converged on a set of languages in general either! Most of my backends are written in Scala of all things, and LLMs have no issue with it. If anything, the expressive type system is helpful for them.
> To add to this, I definitely wouldn't say we've converged on a set of languages in general either!
Absolutely agree. I’d take a guess that a decent chunk, if not majority of “business” applications probably still exist in either Django or Spring Boot. Should all of those be rewritten now “just ‘cause”?
Have you found LLMs to be good at metalinguistic abstraction? I have used them a little bit for lisp programming but never once have I seen them introduce macro.
For the curious, there is an official YouTube channel with the previous editions https://www.youtube.com/@racketlang/playlists (It usually take a few months until the videos are edited and uploaded.)
I've been messing around with a language that I summarize as:
ALOE = Scheme + Smalltalk + Types
https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket
Prototype is in Racket.
quite elegant, feels like a great balance idiomatic scheme and OO
RacketCon is Saturday https://con.racket-lang.org
behnamoh 20 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: RacketCon Is Saturday
I'm curious: does anyone really care about Racket anymore? In general, does anyone really care about esoteric languages anymore?
With AI, we have converged on a set of languages. For the web, it's JavaScript or TypeScript. For backend, it's Go and Rust. Pretty much nothing else can get picked by AI if you start a new project. If you even like a language like Elixir, there seems to be less and less incentive to use it in production when AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed of Elixir.
I'm saying this as someone who is designing a programming language, and for me, it's just a lot of fun, but I also know I should not hope for my language to take off anytime soon.
--------------------------
I think the Lisp family of languages are still the productivity boost they always were, especially with a good REPL. They can be as fast and safe as Rust and more expressive than JavaScript doing front end work. The deep support for macros and more really let you mold a program to fit the problem domain. Frontier models are reported to work as effectively with Lisp as any other language, and you can have much more succinct (token efficient) code while having more meaningful abstractions for readability by humans. I expect the two should go very well together. Plus you're dealing with a single language without the complexity of something like Rust or inconsistencies of JavaScript.
Also, I wish your comment wasn't downvoted to oblivion. I'd hope there are other useful responses that people won't be able to view.
LLMs are able to write racket. I have a fairly large project I've been vibecoding for the last 6 months. Models predating deepseek flash 0731 used to make paren mistakes and had a hard time. But now Opus 5.5 for example does not make any mistake writing clear racket code.
To add to this, I definitely wouldn't say we've converged on a set of languages in general either! Most of my backends are written in Scala of all things, and LLMs have no issue with it. If anything, the expressive type system is helpful for them.
> To add to this, I definitely wouldn't say we've converged on a set of languages in general either!
Absolutely agree. I’d take a guess that a decent chunk, if not majority of “business” applications probably still exist in either Django or Spring Boot. Should all of those be rewritten now “just ‘cause”?
I wouldn't say we've settled on a specific set of languages
You forgot about Python.
Have you found LLMs to be good at metalinguistic abstraction? I have used them a little bit for lisp programming but never once have I seen them introduce macro.
I explicitly asked LLM to write abstract away with a DSL and it did that. LLMs are good at this too.
If someone posts a story about topic Y and a reply is "does anyone really care about topic Y?" I would expect it to be flagged and downvoted.
The answer is "yes". Obviously people still care. No need to resurrect a dead bad post.