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- Hacker News
- The way the Rhombus / Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries.by threatofrain
- I agree that a ranking mechanism would be nice, but what do you mean by "fraud garbage"? I personally am not aware of any malicious package in the Racket ecosystem.by sorawee
- I wish they had chosen a more "modern" name for the language.by behnamoh
- Honestly a unique searchable name is better. I type in racket and results are mixed with tennis and I need to suffix "Language"by jambutters
- What would be a modern name for a language?by Jtsummers
- The practicality of Racket is interesting; sometimes a language wins simply because its ecosystem makes certain tasks much easier.
- I never really liked Python's indentation-instead-of-curly-brackets thing, why are people reusing it?by mherdelight
- As most other things - you get used to it.
But it's important to note, at you need editor support for rendindenting blocks easily and correctly.
by soegaard - Because whether you like it is not really of any importance to most people.by tiagod
- I love it. I'm gonna indent anyways for clarity!
I'm... not a super fan of rhombus' emphasis on metaprogramming beyond supporting the language itself though.
by rtpg - > why are people reusing it?
Python has remained in the top 5 (often near or at the top) most used programming languages for years. Meaningful whitespace is not stopping people from using it in enough numbers to make it clear that it's a detriment as a language feature.
by Jtsummers - With AI becoming so predominant, I wonder if dynamically typed languages will lose favorability? Seems to me like a heavily documented, statically typed language is going to be ideal for AI programming. I'm wondering what role these flexible, coder-friendly, dynamically typed languages will play in the years to come.by Skywing
- Actually, staticly typed languages are easier for both humans and machines; however dynamically typed languages are harder for humans and probably neutral for LLMs. LLM should be able to infer usage (hence "typing") because it can put the entire codebase in its context, while humans cannot.by soanvig
- That is a really good question. My personal intuition is that LLMs do well with any language as long as you set up for fast syntax checking tools, access to either a REPL or very fast to run tests, etc.
I usually use small local models, and the work to set up very concise skills and efficient tooling is a big part of the fun. I have also adopted the practice of writing my own custom coding harnesses (these can be less than 2000 lines of code, not the huge project you might expect.)
- We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org
Rhombus is easy to use and uniquely customizable.
See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html for the release announcement and highlights.
- I experimented with Rhombus some time ago (most especially with Shplait). Is there much new with Shplait? Something I remember struggling with was trying to use racket libraries in Rhombus/Shplait
- Racket was always one of my favorite Lisp / Scheme dialect, mainly because of its very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort, that and Dr Racket lets you see visually where import goes into code, and a bunch of other nice things.
Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages!
That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to.
The entire Rhombus repo is all Racket:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++languag...
- FWIW Rhombus is about 70% Racket and 30% Rhombus (by loc)
- > shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages!
Building languages was always one of selling points racket tried to push; the "Language-Oriented Programming Language" slogan and all.
by arvyy - I really want to like Racket? I really do, but I just never really enjoyed like I liked Python. And despite trying a bunch of other Lisps and liking them, something about Dr. Racket annoyed me. I'm not sure why.
It's "cool" and the ecosystem rules, and it's fast enough, I just never really found that I liked writing Racket or using Dr. Racket the same way I like writing Python so I never really reached for it when I was trying to do something. Indeed, from the first time I looked at Python I liked it. That was not the case with Javascript or Java or C or PHP? I don't know, I like Python and really want a practical Lisp that I can really sink my teeth into? So by all accounts I should love Racket. And yet, I don't.
That said, Rhombus looks really nice at first glance. This might be worth a sustained excursion to build something a bit more fun... I'm kind of excited about this!
by piloto_ciego - Rhombus is what Racket should have been, back when it was the learning language at MIT, before it became Python. Had it been like this, maybe Python would have never gained traction within that community. The world would have been a very different place.
Rhombus' syntax is soooo beautiful. As a Racketeer, it's my dream language. All the power of Racket... without a Lots of Insipid, Stupid Parenthesis. Not that I don't like the parens, mind you, but Rhombus looks so much more... 2009. My only regret is that nobody will use Rhombus, except a few enthusiasts, for fun. In an AI age, new programming languages should really be LLM-first, sadly. But it makes me so happy that there are some people who still care about humans coding.
by dexterlagan - The actual challenger to Python would have been F#, but Microsoft being Microsoft made sure that that wasn't the case.by bmitc
- What properties make a language more LLM-friendly? I've found Claude will readily make use of a REPL when available.by snikeris
- I love Racket, and have a ton of Racket code I have written over the years. When I get home from a vacation I will have an AI translate a small sample of my Racket code to Rhombus: easiest way for me to play with the language.
- > As a Racketeer, it's my dream language. All the power of Racket...
Interesting. For me the interesting part of Racket has always been the language itself. What else is there that you like and can use from Rhombus?
by klez - IIRC, MIT moved away from SICP, and therefore Scheme, because (something like) they saw the field for MIT EECS graduates changing -- from understanding how systems worked in detail, and being able to build from scratch, to assembling systems from off-the-shelf components. And I guess some thought that a currently popular language (first Java, and then Python) was more appealing for that.
One of the other objections to SICP, at least outside of MIT, was that it was too hard (especially for high school students). Which is part of why HtDP, and much of Racket supported that and other educational initiatives by Matthias Felleisen, et al. https://htdp.org/
I'm curious: Did MIT use Racket at some point for SICP, rather than MIT Scheme, either officially or grassroots? Jens Axel Soegaard, Mike Sperber, and I made some conveniences for doing SICP with Racket, circa 2009, but I don't recall hearing that Racket was used for SICP at MIT itself, only at various other places. https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/sicp/
by neilv