Top all-time · #504
Matthew Butterick
Personal blog · beautifulracket.comprogrammingwriting
Matthew Butterick's personal blog at beautifulracket.com covers programming and writing. Since 2016, 116 different Hacker News readers have linked it 148 times, most often “Beautiful Racket (2016)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matthew Butterick's Beautiful Racket book and its appendices, usually as the recommended introduction to Racket and language-building. Commenters point to it for making languages, learning Lisp and its approach to macros.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Commenters call it a really good introduction to making interpreters, the best defense of macros and well-written, and recommend it for learning Racket and Lisp
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Beautiful Racket
Most-linked posts?
- Beautiful Racket (2016)47 people · 52 mentions · first linked 2017-10-15
- Beautiful Racket v1.012 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-05-22
- Why Language-Oriented Programming? Why Racket?8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-02-23
- Why Racket? Why Lisp?8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-07-15
- Why I no longer contribute to Racket6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-06-16
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-18
- Thoughts on Rhombus (formerly known as Racket2) (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-06
- Thoughts on Racket and Chez Scheme3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-07-15
- The making of Beautiful Racket (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-09-26
- Make a language in one hour: stacker3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-29
What Hacker News says?
Matthew Butterick has done some good in this space, mostly from the perspective of typography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3tZisVDIVk https://practicaltypography.com/ https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/racketcon.html
Comment linking /appendix/racketcon.html
on “Hardest problem in computer science: centering things”Submitted Beautiful Racket v1.0 as a story · 537 points
HN discussionhttps://beautifulracket.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted Why I no longer contribute to Racket as a story · 441 points
HN discussionIt looks like the SVG's style block[0] applies a black background to the svg element: svg {background: rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)} which fails to render in chrome due to the floats but renders fine in firefox. If set to white or removed entirely, it will display correctly in Firefox. 0: http://beautifulracket.com/img/polboxes16.svg
Comment linking /img/polboxes16.svg
on “Beautiful Racket v1.0”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? as a story · 327 points
HN discussionUpdated version: http://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.html
Comment linking /appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.html
on “Beautiful Racket v1.0”Submitted Beautiful Racket as a story · 287 points
HN discussionUnfortunately, no: http://beautifulracket.com/about-the-author.html#faq
Comment linking /about-the-author.html
on “Beautiful Racket v1.0”Submitted Why Language-Oriented Programming? Why Racket? as a story · 281 points
HN discussionhttp://beautifulracket.com/appendix/domain-specific-language...
Comment linking /appendix/domain-specific-languages.html
on “The Idea of Lisp”Submitted Beautiful Racket as a story · 225 points
HN discussionIn Python, I've always run into the problem of expression-vs-statement. For example, in my mind I want to do this: (a++ if a==b else b++) + 1 Or something like this (borrowed from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65024477/walrus-operator... ): from datetime import datetime timestamps = ['30:02:17:36', '26:07:44:25', '25:19:30:38','25:07:40:47'] timestamps_dt = [ datetime(days=day,hours=hour,minutes=mins,seconds=s…
Comment linking /appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.html
on “WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014) as a story · 202 points
HN discussionRacket is also a great environment for making languages. See, e.g.: http://beautifulracket.com
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages”Submitted Beautiful Racket (2016) as a story · 158 points
HN discussionAnd 16 hours later: [0] http://beautifulracket.com
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages”Submitted Master Recipe – A summary of the steps in creating a new language in Racket as a story · 120 points
HN discussionI've been reading http://beautifulracket.com/ and its a really good introduction on making interprets.
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages”Submitted Thoughts on Racket2 as a story · 95 points
HN discussionFWIW, Common Lisp's macro system is relatively simple. I've been meaning to check out http://beautifulracket.com/ sometime to learn about the Racket way. Maybe Datalog could make a cleaner base for your project? Just a random thought; bound to be lots more considerations. Yeah, I have a project right now too where these questions come up -- https://github.com/darius/squeam -- though it's not really ready for anyone.
Comment linking /
on “MoonScript, a programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? as a story · 52 points
HN discussionSo, I guess you don't know why OP specifically asked about Racket: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/dagstuhl19/ https://beautifulracket.com/stacker/why-make-languages.html
Comment linking /stacker/why-make-languages.html
on “Ohm – A library and language for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, etc.”Submitted Thoughts on Racket and Chez Scheme as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> I actually do not understand why I would use Racket You don't HAVE to. But if you are interested, maybe this would help: https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.htm... EDIT: Also, if you want a look at the dialects, check out the comic here: http://landoflisp.com/ Be advised that it is extremely difficult to "sell" Lisp and related languages to someone that hasn't bought the idea yet. No-one seems…
Comment linking /appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.html
on “New Racket Language Website”Submitted Why Racket? Why Lisp? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAnd don't forget this beautiful book on Racket, https://beautifulracket.com/
Comment linking /
on “New Racket Language Website”Submitted Beautiful racket as a story · 6 points
HN discussionMatthew Butterick uses it to publish all his current books (as far as I know), check out some of them at: * https://beautifulracket.com/ (and this about making it https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/racketcon.html ) * https://practicaltypography.com/
Comment linking /appendix/racketcon.html
on “Pollen: the book is a program”Submitted Beautiful Racket as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
