What a Racket

I stumbled across this article http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2013-03.html#e2013-03-27T124603.htm which briefly discusses Racket and SmallTalk and how the languages are envisioned as replacing the operating system. They mention the idea that an operating system shouldn't exist and it only does due to the shortcomings of the computer language.

The article mentions this video, http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Racket, which goes over using Racket (a LISP dialect) as an example of language oriented programming. It give an interesting demo and there is a nice summary of it here http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2012-09.html#e2012-09-29T160435.htm so I won't re-summarize that.

A language for creating languages

This set of links really galvanized some ideas I had kicking around. The idea of having a fully extensible system that you define in the domain language is extremely powerful. It's like taking Domain Driven Design to the extreme. I find myself already leaning in this direction and trying to use F# for this purpose. The reason I moved from Wordpress to a static site for my blog is because I wanted to experiment with a more deliberate system with abstractions that I could create myself.

One of the examples in the presentation was a document generator which is used to generate a web based slideshow. I had been thinking about doing some online ebook publishing as a creative experiment and lo-and-behold someone already used Racket to create a tool that was only an early-stage idea in my head - http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/.

Living system

Some of my thoughts on improving the F# REPL would probably be doable with Racket based on how extensible the environment itself is. At the end of the day programmers debate the static code in the file and seemngly lose track of the fact that the code comes to life and becomes an interactable thing. The LISP machine or SmallTalk environment seems like an interesting idea using this principle and is making me think I should hurry up and dig into one or the other.