I started programming in elementary school.
When I was young, I was fascinated by the idea of automation. I loathed doing the same repetitive task over and over again, and I always yearned for a way to solve the general problem. When I learned about programming, I was immediately hooked: it was so easy to turn repetitive tasks into automated pipelines that would free me from ever having to do the same dull, frustrating exercise ever again.
Of course, one of the first things I found out once I’d started was that nothing is ever quite so simple. Before long, my solutions to eliminate repetition grew repetitive, and it became clear I spent a lot of time typing out the same things, over and over again, creating the very problem I had initially set out to destroy. It was through this that I grew interested in functions, classes, and other repetition-reducing aids, and soon enough, I discovered the wonderful world of abstraction.
Read more →
Racket ships with racket/generic, a system for defining generic methods, functions that work differently depending on what sort of value they are supplied. I have made heavy use of this feature in my collections library, and it has worked well for my needs, but that system does have a bit of a limitation: it only supports single dispatch. Method implementations may only be chosen based on a single argument, so multiple dispatch is impossible.
Read more →
Macros are one of Racket's flagship features, and its macro system really is state of the art. Of course, it can sometimes be difficult to demonstrate why macros are so highly esteemed, in part because it can be hard to find self-contained examples of using macros in practice. Of course, one thing that macros are perfect for is filling a "hole" in the language by introducing a feature a language lacks, and one of those features in Typed Racket is ADTs.
Read more →
Application configuration can be a pain. Modern web apps don't live on dedicated boxes, they run on VPSes somewhere in the amorphous "cloud", and keeping configuration out of your application's repository can seem like more trouble than it's worth. Fortunately, The Twelve-Factor App provides a set of standards for keeping web apps sane, and one of those guidelines advises keeping configuration in the environment.
Envy is the declarative bridge between Racket code and the outside world of the environment.
Read more →
Heroku is a "platform as a service" that provides an incredibly simple way to deploy simple internet applications, and I take liberal advantage of its free tier for testing out simple applications. It has support for a variety of languages built-in, but Racket is not currently among them. Fortunately, Heroku provides an interface for adding custom build processes for arbitrary types of applications, called “buildpacks”. I've built one for Racket apps, and with just a little bit of configuration, it’s possible to get a Racket webserver running on Heroku.
Read more →
So, I have a blog now. It's a simple static blog, but what's unique about it is that it's powered by Racket; specifically, it uses Greg Hendershott's fantastic Frog tool. I've taken this and moulded it to my tastes to build my blog, including configuring automatic deployment via Travis CI, so my blog is always up-to-date.
Read more →