Realm of Racket
by Forrest Bice, Matthias Felleisen, Conrad Barski, David Van Horne, Rose DeMaio, Spencer Florence, Feng-Yun Mimi Lin, Scott Lindeman, Nicole Nussbaum, Eric Peterson, Ryan Plessner, David Van Horn · first published 2013
71% recommend15% neutral13% critical
Why HN recommends it
Playful, game-building introduction to Racket that teaches CS concepts progressively through small projects. Suits beginners, kids and teens, and experienced programmers wanting a fun route into Lisp-style programming.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…programming book -- from 1978). 2. Lipovača, Miran. Learn You A Haskell for Great Good. 3. Hebert, Fred. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (inspired by the Haskell book). 4. Felleisen, Matthias. Realm of Racket (basically Land of Lisp for Racket. Oddly, nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure" or "Society of Scheme" yet.)
on “Land of Lisp (2010)” ↗…more interested in a truly mature language with a more academic community, read Land of Lisp. If you're looking for a simple language that's easy to learn, or if metaprogramming is really your jam, read Realm of Racket. As far as editors go, just start with whichever one you personally like best. They're all fine. I wouldn't bother spending much time worrying about that until after you've confirmed you want to stick…
on “Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?” ↗…"batteries-included" Scheme derivative with a simple IDE/debugger, and either (2) Concrete Abstractions (free at https://gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions-annotated-to...), or (3) the upcoming book Realm of Racket (coming in May), which will cover some of the same CS 101 material as well as GUI and distributed programming via writing games in Racket. (There is an earlier book called Land of Lisp but I feel its…
on “How would you teach a middle / high schooler how to code?” ↗How about a book like Realm of Racket or Head First HTML and CSS? But keep in mind that programming is fun for some people and drudgery for others.
on “Ask HN: Interactive programming lessons for Kids (Offline)?” ↗In my opinion a modern equivalent of messing with programming at school would be Racket. There are couple of awesome books `Realm of Racket`[1] and `How to Design Program`. Realm of Racket introduce programming by writing games. Its actually very easy to write interactive programs with this framework called big-bang. Matthias Felleison recently…
on “Tech Prep by Facebook” ↗She can learn just about anything nowadays from sites like Coursera, edx, and Udacity. Books like Realm of Racket can be fun introductions to programming that happen to teach some advanced stuff. Books that the parent's might like are Carol Dweck's Mindset, Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers, and Angela Duckworth's…
on “Ask HN: 12 year old tech savvy girl – books, programs, events, advice?” ↗…Basically you bring up the REPL in another tmux or screen split then you can just pipe your forms to it. https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime Here's a few previews for fun books I enjoyed, land of lisp and realm of racket by conrad barski https://books.google.ca/books/about/Realm_of_Racket.html?id=... https://books.google.ca/books?id=9apQfCRhvm0C&printsec=front...
on “Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?” ↗The Little Schemer is a great book but it's in no way practical and very much focuses on teaching you comp sci - it's been a while but IIRC doesn't it culminate in constructing the Y combinator? Realm of Racket [0] seems like it might be more OP's speed. [0] https://www.amazon.ca/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159...
on “Tutorial Series to learn Common Lisp quickly” ↗…know they're good. LYAH and LYSE are both VERY good. Like, really, really good. They are free, but if they weren't, they'd make this bundle worth it on their own. Likewise, The Land of Lisp and The Realm of Racket are great if you want to think like a Lisper/Schemer. TLOL, however, is a better book, covering (I think) more stuff. TROR also suffers a library dependance, but I don't especially LIKE Racket, so take…
on “Humble Book Bundle: The Joy of Coding” ↗I am not (yet) familiar with this app, but I do like to suggest to any new (young or old) programmers to give Racket along with the book 'Realm of Racket' a try. It's a simple enough programming language to get a good foundation with important principles, but also can take you nearly as far as you want. Edit: For those who downvoted my comment here, I'd…
on “Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds” ↗…something you just can't get out of reading a book. It makes it that much more approachable. If you show kids or even new programmers Swift Playgrounds along with something like Learn You a Haskell or Realm of Racket, or even tell them about Scratch, which do you think they would gravitate towards more?
on “Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds” ↗I really liked going through Realm of Racket with my 11 year old daughter. It pretty much is the same format. It made me miss the days of typing code from a book and hit run. (Well run never really worked then it was hours of debugging but that…
on “The Land of Lisp” ↗I have been programming R for some work and enjoyed it but it wasn't very good code. So after digging a while to figure out how to get better with R I learned Racket. 1) "How to Design Programs" is the best book I have ever gone through for any language. http://www.htdp.org/ 2) Went through "Realm of Racket" with my 11 year old daughter. http://www.realmofracket.com/ 3) The documentation is the
on “Ask HN: Programming – what changed your mind about a language or feature?” ↗Seems like the most common answer to this might be SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs -- you'll find course videos pretty easily from Google; the ones from the authors are really great). Note that it's based on Scheme, which is a ancestor of Racket, but Racket has a language pack that papers over the differences and works with the code from the book. Official course website:
on “Racket v7.2” ↗Please don't what, have an opinion? I read SICP as an experienced programmer and I didn't find it impractical at all; in fact, it kickstarted my interest in other lisps. I read Realm of Racket as an experienced programmer (after knowing Common Lisp and Clojure well) and it was entertaining and, yes, a gradual introduction to Racket. I'm sorry if you disagree, but was answering the question…
on “Racket v7.2” ↗