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o, why is the continuation monad the mother of all monads? The short answer is that, by enabling transparent inversion of control, it eliminates the need to sprinkle hooks for monad-specific code everywhere; normal (as much as anything involving delimited continuations can be “normal”) evaluation rules will be subverted as needed. — All you need is call/cc
To a language designer, Racket is a programming language laboratory. That is, Racket comes with a unique collection of linguistic mechanisms that enable the quick construction of reliable languages, language fragments, and their composition. These tools are so easy to use that plain programmers can design a language after a little bit of instruction. So when a well-trained programmer decides that none of the available dialects is well-suited for a task, he designs a new dialect and writes his program in it. As Paul Hudak said, “the ultimate abstraction is a domain specific language.” — Racket is…
Using Emacs in an IDE world. IDEs all look too complex to me. I am happy with fine-grained text editors like Emacs or (Neo)vim. Every time I try to use a light (VS Code) or not so light (IntelliJ stuff) IDE, I blow up after 10'.
Euler’s Formula. Looks like a nice Lisp-based website, right?
For making a viable Google competitor, I believe that ranking is a harder problem than indexing, but even if we just look at indexing, there are individual domains that contain on the order of one trillion pages we might want to index (like Twitter) and I’d guess that we can find on the order a trillion domains. If you try to configure any off-the-shelf search index to hold an index of some number of trillions of items to handle a load of, say, 1/100th Google’s load, with a latency budget of, say, 100ms (most of the latency should be for ranking, not indexing), I think you’ll find that this isn’t trivial. — I could do that in a weekend!
However, we shouldn’t forget that we are still living in the stone age of computational science. Fortran was the Paleolithic, Python is the Neolithic, but we have to move on. — Exploring Racket
Benefits of not using an IDE. Main point as far as I’m concerned is that even light IDEs (e.g., VS Code) are too complex for what I really need to do. Git and debugger integration are a plus, though, but I already get that using Emacs or Vim.