Racket News - Happy New Year Edition: https://racket-news.com/2020/01/racket-news-issue-23.html

@pocmatos Great idea to have an “2019 in review” section.

I agree with @plragde that SICP doesn’t seem great as a broad intro to algorithms. It seems more about a perspective on programming per-se, which (of course) includes some algorithms, but the book omits many crucial things you’d want to learn in an algorithms class.

For example, our algorithms class covers dynamic programming, divide and conquer, greedy algorithms, etc.. All of these can be done very well in Racket, but SICP doesn’t specifically teach these things too well based on what I remember

I do think that if the students are willing to learn Racket, Racket could be a great choice for the class. However, it is probably worth admitting that if they haven’t seen Racket before a nontrivial part of the class will just be teaching the students basic functional programming concepts, so you will necessarily be sacrificing some of the algorithms material you might want to cover. This might be what you want, but it depends on what tradeoffs you’re willing to accept, I think.

what is a common file suffix for files that just contain s expressions?

maybe just .scm?

.s feels weird because it reminds me too much of assembly.

I don’t think there is one.

@krismicinski .rktd is occasionally used for files that contain s-expression data meant to be used with read and/or write

(note that’s for s-expression data, not code)

right, that’s also my use-case

@soegaard2 https://racket-stories.com is offline :disappointed:

@spdegabrielle Thanks for the tip. It’s up and running again.