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.
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.
My case for why Elixir is especially suited for use with AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835781 (summary: it's mostly about the BEAM, which is more of a k8s killer than a rust killer).
I don't think this really applies to any of the benefits I've described there:
> AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed
Industry takeoff would certainly be a nice-to-have. But the racket community is largely computer scientists, who program for research. Will computer scientists turn to Rust to write papers because it's fast ? I don't think so, because their needs seems to be a language that's easy to pick up and experiment with, and writepapers with. People will argue over sexp syntax, but that's why Rhombus exists.
The force of convergence should almost make us care more about other languages, since the explosion of software is a multiplier on good/bad designs, and we should consider what we want our AIs to be using.
Aye--even if you've reached the point of thinking that the only role of a human is to feed good ideas into the machine, language is a thing that shapes thought--Lisp as a family is a thing different enough from a lang wanting to be a better C/C++ or a better Java that getting your brain thinking in terms of it can help you produce a different set of ideas (some of which may even be good ones). For me personally, it's really opened my mind to functional programming and intelligent use of recursion, in a way that I probably wouldn't have ever had cause to consider if I only ever concerned myself with the minimally convergent set of standard business langs, in the way that all our legacy code had been using them.
Of course, Lisps also seem to have the property of attracting people who genuinely like the practice of programming and, if it clicks with you, it has the property of generally leaving you really excited to write more of it. If you're hauling up and spending real American dollars to spend a weekend packed in a hall full of nerds to chat about a niche programming language, you're probably in that group. Consequent to that, it'd be a mighty small-minded thing to wonder what the point of joy is, when you could just be managing an agent swarm to write more enterprise Go code.
There are enough AI stories on Hacker News. We don't need AI advocates coming to the stories that aren't about AI and saying they don't matter because they're not AI.
Things that aren't AI still matter and are still interesting.
Oh thats such a killjoy attitude. There is more to programming then "production", "shipping" and the overall corporate lala. You said it yourself, you get a lot of joy from designing your own programming language. And you know, even BEFORE AI it would have been unrealistic to see your langauge actually take off big time. So you answered your own question. Racket is likely not interesting to one of the big coprs. But you know, frankly, who cares? Some people use AI and have it write only 4 languages? Sure. Go ahead, and you know? Who cares? Let them have their monoculture. Such a sad sad sad comment.
ALOE = Scheme + Smalltalk + Types
https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket
Prototype is in Racket.
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.
The answer is "yes". Obviously people still care. No need to resurrect a dead bad post.
what a disaster we have ahead of us not because AI but because this kind of thinking
I don't think this really applies to any of the benefits I've described there:
> AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed
You can pick literally almost anything, and current models will be able to write it. I don't know how you arrived at that statement.
Of course, Lisps also seem to have the property of attracting people who genuinely like the practice of programming and, if it clicks with you, it has the property of generally leaving you really excited to write more of it. If you're hauling up and spending real American dollars to spend a weekend packed in a hall full of nerds to chat about a niche programming language, you're probably in that group. Consequent to that, it'd be a mighty small-minded thing to wonder what the point of joy is, when you could just be managing an agent swarm to write more enterprise Go code.
Things that aren't AI still matter and are still interesting.
Flag the twits that bring it up in every thread. They're trolling at this point, not actually trying to have a conversation.