Racket is Making Me Sad

24 Aug 2025, by Aadi

Such a lovely place!

Being a mathematician, I’ve been fascinated with Lisp. Then I read Matthew Butterick’s Why Racket? Why Lisp?. Soon enough, Racket became the new interesting thing for me, and my new weekend hobby. I followed along the beautiful Beautiful Racket. The tone of the book is energetic, excited, positive, encouraging the reader to be creative and challenge themselves. It was like I found a new park!

Wait, am I the only one here?

But something started feeling strange. Whenever I got stuck with something while following the book, I found it very difficult to find answers myself. Online forums weren’t that helpful, and Racket’s own documentation was difficult to read as a reference. Of course, being so new to the language, and this also being my first Lisp, I didn’t expect to be able to understand any random section of the documentation. I am grateful it is there, but I needed something more approachable.

Then I came across Matthew Butterick’s Why I no longer contribute to Racket. What a bummer when I was halfway through the book! I started to question what I was even learning — how much was it Racket, and how much was it the dumbed-down version of the br package written for the book? Would I be able to write my own code without the br package if it breaks in the future?

Hello?

Weekends came and went and Racket started to becoming less and less exciting. Any walls I hit were basically dead ends. Maybe I’m not smart enough to be able to find and follow what is available out there. That doesn’t mean I should continue what is not fun any more.

Maybe a different source to learn? Maybe I can find someone else who’s excited about it now? What about a static site generator in Racket and supports Scribble? If you go looking for one the first thing you’ll find is Greg Hendershott’s Frog. And I did. However, I immediately reached his post about no longer being involved in Racket.

Then I tried making presentations with #lang slideshow and found this nice explainer from Asumu Takikawa, an ex-core developer of Racket. Today I came across Winston Weinert’s post about his update after a year of letting go of his Racket packages.

I was very excited to listen to Shriram Krishnamurthy on Episode 141 of Functional Geekery but he seems to have exited the leadership of Racket too.

This is not to say that there is no-one involved, but I am finding it really difficult to be excited about it. This was my hobby just like LaTeX, Python, Perl, and C were hobbies growing up. But it was much easier to pick them up, think of something to do with them, look for resources to get, and learn as I go. It never felt like this.

I don’t want to join a forum or attend conferences. I’m not qualified nor interested in the development of the language itself. I am, however, really curious about what the language makes convenient, and how to take advantage of that. But trying to answer that question has only left me with a list of broken packages, “so long” blog posts, or CS jargon I can’t comprehend. I myself have no enthusiasm to bring to the party either.

Reading about Racket online has turned into feeling like being in an abandoned amusement park: everything is showing age, depressingly quiet, and dates scribbled on the things are from years ago.

I hope that the Racket community continues to grow and I am able to use it, learn it, and enjoy it! Until then, at least it has introduced me to Lisp and hence its many dialects. Perhaps I can say hello to Hy?