Update on my Racket exit
11 comments
·August 24, 2025behnamoh
leoc
Tim Peters and GvR did both hit the news https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/09/core_python_developer... in the past couple of years!
CommieBobDole
To quote Charles Issawi:
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."
Big projects have big problems to deal with. On small projects with no such distractions, the influence of personalities is relatively larger.
null
delusional
Small languages, especially languages without an organization behind them, don't have anybody to manage the oddities of the humans creating it. Python had that one core developer that was banned by the oversight board. There was quite a bit of drama around that, but it was buried in the boring Bureaucracy of it all.
I'd be surprised if some of the Java developers wouldn't be assholes or weird, just statistically. The difference there is that you don't interact with the individual developers. Oracle handle all of that internally.
ivape
Never ever underestimate people’s need to not be bored. The meditative mind is not something that’s just handed to you.
dang
Related:
Racket frustrates me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36541758 - June 2023 (127 comments)
edem
I have 2 questions:
- What is he using now? (Python?)
- Is there a LISP dialect that doesn't suffer from this problem? I can see that from time to time LISP projects start taking off just do die a year later and I'm stuck using Emacs (Lighttable comes into mind)
Jtsummers
> - What is he using now? (Python?)
From the blog:
>> I’ve been writing a great deal of Python, Bash, Awk, Perl 5 for my own consumption
valorzard
Clojure and Common Lisp are still around and are quite active. There’s been a lot of cool stuff brewing for both languages recently
forgetfulness
It was developer experience that precipitated this fallout, a language usually needs to be growing in user base for the developer experience to improve as people complain and tackle problems they encounter.
The old linked thread had some prominent figure saying “but just do <inconvenient thing>” in response to every issue, if the language isn’t growing, only people accustomed to the inconveniences stick around.
So, I’d say it used to be Clojure, but now I doubt there is one.
Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal? I've been happily using Python for over a decade and never encountered weird, dramatic behavior by its creators or main developers.
Could it be that some languages, through the target audience they attract, seal their disastrous fate? By that I mean languages that attract nerds like me or peculiar math-oriented minds who can nit pick at every single detail.
You wouldn't expect this much nit from a mass-scale enterprise language like Java.