Strange Loop

#lang wishful thinking

What might solving a real production problem in a language specifically designed for building languages that cooperate look like? Racket lets you program by fusing multiple DSLs together, reshaping and moulding your language to fit the domain, putting up towers of languages, in fact, each level closer to the language of the desired discourse. Get a glimpse of how this might work by implementing something that's simple yet spans a whole range on the abstraction ladder from bit twiddling to Web frameworks. Learn how to really go off on a tangent while implementing FastCGI protocol in Racket: we won't tie ourselves to the defaults that Racket designers blessed us with, but boldly employ wishful thinking, borrow readily from other languages. We won't rush to map domain vocabulary onto what basic building blocks our language provides - we'll try to actually speak the language of the domain. Want prototypes with Lua-style metatables? Concise syntax? Single and multiple inheritance with generic dispatch? How generic should that generic be? Multimethods? Full Metaobject Protocol, maybe? Beyond Metaobject Protocol? A language of patterns to avoid bit twiddling? That one Web framework that speaks the language of the Web yet lets you write plain "desktop app" code? Build yourself a better language. Dare say: I wish I could - then make it so.

Vlad Kozin

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Dilettante programmer from London who taught himself programming with Racket through HtDP and PLAI, did some paid Javascript, which he does not recommend, then paid Clojure, which he does. He has now gone back to the roots and writes lots of Racket. Former @yandex and @droitfintech. Fall'13 @recursecenter aka @hackerschool alum.