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    Alex Hhh

    alex-hhh.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2018

    Alex Harsányi writes about Racket programming, with GUI programs, games, and plotting examples, and develops the ActivityLog2 app.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    ProgrammingLanguages & CompilersData & Visualization
    What HN says

    Commenters recommend it as a source of high-quality real-world Racket GUI and graphics work, calling it very inspiring and a good showcase.

    Stats for nerds
    19HN people shared it
    18linked in comments
    412story points
    Jan 2025last shared
    2018people per year2025

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Chess Game Using Racket’s Pasteboard
      1 person · 107 points · first shared 2018 · 11 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Racket GUI Screenshots
      2 people · 82 points · first shared 2021 · 15 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Pumpkin Plot
      2 people · 72 points · first shared 2022 · 4 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Writing a Simple Password Generator in Racket
      1 person · 67 points · first shared 2019 · 37 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Implementing Ishido, a game from the 90s, using the Racket graphical facilities
      1 person · 45 points · first shared 2020 · 3 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Asteroids Game in Racket (2021)
      3 people · 17 points · first shared 2021 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Space Invaders – Alex Harsányi
      2 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Plotting the World in Racket
      1 person · 4 points · first shared 2021 · Discussion on HN
    9. 9
      Dual Axis Plots [Racket]
      1 person · 3 points · first shared 2020 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      Chess Game Using Racket’s Pasteboard (part 3)
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2018 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • nsmJan 2024

      I would like to disagree with this view of Racket.

      I'm a fairly experienced professional programmer with a lot of systems experience, and I find Racket an extremely well thought out, competently implemented and high performance (particularly with the switch to Chez Scheme) language.

      I wrote a bit about it at https://nikhilism.com/post/2023/racket-beyond-languages/ and Bogdan Popa and Alex Hirsanyi have done amazing stuff with the language https://defn.io/ https://alex-hhh.github.io/index.html including a sophisticated web framework, a Kafka GUI client and so on.

      I think the only deficiency for a "pragmatic for a seasoned programmer" (beyond the standard "no FAANG is sponsoring it" related lack of resources and presence in popular discussion) is the lack of good editor integration beyond emacs. That said, I've found DrRacket perfectly reasonable for my uses, although clunky. I'm not saying it can replace something like Python, but that is more because of the smaller ecosystem and contributor base than anything wrong with the language itself.

    • evdubsAug 2020

      To add to this, OP, there is an interesting blog with many examples of graphics development in Racket:

      https://alex-hhh.github.io/

      I have written a couple GUI applications in Racket; maybe they can serve as motivation to discover Racket's GUI capabilities:

      https://github.com/evdubs/chart-simulator

      https://github.com/evdubs/renegade-way

      There are limitations to Racket's GUI toolkit compared to writing a native Qt/GTK/WPF/Cocoa application. You may find it easy to express simple/not-so-complex interfaces and then find it much more difficult to do other things. There's also the fact that Racket's real threads story isn't so great.

      If I needed to write a cross-platform GUI application for the masses, I'd probably pick JavaFX over Racket, but Racket has been very impressive if your initial impression is to not expect much.

    • phillc73Jan 2020

      cl-ana,
      Common Lisp data analysis library with emphasis on modularity and conceptual clarity - https://github.com/ghollisjr/cl-ana

      numcl, a numpy clone in Common Lisp - https://github.com/numcl/numcl

      Clojure kixi-stats- https://cljdoc.org/d/kixi/stats/0.5.0/doc/readme

      and the book Clojure for Data Science - http://clojuredatascience.com/

      Clojure's Incanter has been mentioned already - http://incanter.org/

      OWL, the OCaml Scientific Computing project - https://ocaml.xyz/

      And probably not quite what you're looking for, but there is a Racket data frame structure which provides some data science like manipulation capabilities - https://alex-hhh.github.io/2018/08/racket-data-frame.html

      Appreciate some of the above are Schemes and not Lisps, but they may still be interesting.

    • jboynycMar 2020

      Don't dismiss Racket too soon, I would say. The developer of ActivityLog2 has been doing a lot to integrate charts and graphs into Racket GUI applications, and the program itself (https://github.com/alex-hhh/ActivityLog2) is a good showcase of that work. His blog is also worth a read (https://alex-hhh.github.io/index.html). Take a look!

    • fileeditviewFeb 2021

      I was/am in the same boat. A few months back someone recommended this blog to me: https://alex-hhh.github.io/

      If you want to see some "real world" high quality Racket GUI stuff this is the place to go. Very inspiring. I'd love to do more with Racket & its GUI lib.

    • BoingBoomTschakJan 2025

      Thanks. Personally, I'd love to see more like https://alex-hhh.github.io/2021/08/fish-puzzle.html

      When I was in university, the usual Prolog example was solving a game of Cluedo.

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