Renaming doesn't help the case much here, if Racket's future is abandonware.
From there:
Phase 1: Brainstorming (months)
Phase 2: Iterative Design (years)
Phase 3: Conversion (months or years)
Phase 4: Transition (years)
I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Plus as a former Perl programmer having watched Perl 5 lost almost everything, chasing a never to have come to reality Perl 6. I can say, given all this, the future of Racket as a language, for its core uses and users is pretty much dead in the years to come. Like dead totally. Racket doesn't even have as much the share of dev mind share or a resource like CPAN at its disposal. Languages like Racket will fade away into oblivion a lot more quickly.
It can be hard to see this in all the enthusiasm in the early stages of the project. But when you embark on multi year project journeys. People's priorities change, people get into health crises, lose jobs, move on to better projects, recessions happen. Core teams that started these projects change so much, newer one's pretty much give up and see no point in it after a while. Many people prefer a perfectly working tool improved over time, than a pie-in-the-sky idea that will never come to see the light of the day. While all this is happening, your existing language, libraries, dev mindshare, tooling suffers. Merely supporting small time fixes means nothing, because no one likes to use a tooling in hospice care. Your core dedicated set of users, who did most of the evangelism for your cause move on to newer tools and languages, for the obvious reasons that they don't see their future with existing tool they like, the newer one is taking for ever and isn't even the same goodness as the current one. Once you lose those users, the newer users you wish to attract from the crowd of Java and Python programmers won't even bother to try, why should they? They have something proven to work in production with tooling, libraries, books, and production success stories for decades.
That is when you realize you lost both your old and new language.
Racket was awesome for what it was. An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp.
It's not late. Probably it's time to stop right now.
Net result is a stagnated Racket, and a non-attractive Rhombus.
Plus C based languages have their winners already. Racket is a kind of a winner in the Lisp family. With Clojure it makes the only other choice. Now if you change the syntax, you are going after users who don't really care what you have to offer, at the same time, you are taking away what your existing users like.
Recently, Perl 6 has indeed become a lot less real, as it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). But it is still very much a real thing (with regular releases since December 2015). And it actually has its own IDE: https://commaide.com .
I think you are mistaking working time for bloat; they can be inversely related; it's easier to add lots of ideas, it's harder to pare things down.
> Plus as a former Perl programmer having watched Perl 5 lost almost everything, chasing a never to have come to reality Perl 6. I can say, given all this, the future of Racket as a language, for its core uses and users is pretty much dead in the years to come. Like dead totally.
This isn't Perl 6.
> Many people prefer a perfectly working tool improved over time, than a pie-in-the-sky idea that will never come to see the light of the day.
Pretty much everyone does, but Racket remains the former. Neither the schedule nor the ambition of new Racket development has been scaled back for Rhombus. It's not even clear that they would once Rhombus was generally available and hosting Racket, though there would also be a place for improvements that didn't fit in Racket.
Indeed. And even Perl 6 is not Perl 6 anymore: it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media).
I know that some well-known Lisp hackers left for Racket, but I've never been clear on how it is really a successor. It does have a great community and ecosystem, but it inherits a ton of the mistakes of Scheme, is unspecified and as such is susceptible to derailments like Rhombus. I think that performance is not that great either, which isn't necessarily a huge deal for many problems but is for some.
What I am genuinely curious about is: from your point of view, what makes Racket a preferable successor to Lisp (which can't easily be grafted into a Lisp environment)? The two things which leap to my mind are the sane read case and the community mindset.
As good as its development environment might be for learning purposes and research, it is no match for neither LispWorks nor Allegro Common Lisp, so it is hard to be a top successor.
In fact there isn't a single commercial Scheme has successful in the market as those Lisp environments, with exception of ChezScheme, used commercially by Cisco.
One could even consider Scheme as more widely used than CL.
The biggest production use case for Lisp today is to learn Lisp.
The biggest use case for Scheme, CL, or Racket is to use to learn Lisp. Racket that way was quite successful.
With all this going on now. Scheme is the only serious Lisp for learning purposes. What new in sights will Rhombus provide here? The biggest use case for trying out scheme was while working through books like SICP.
