The way the Rhombus / Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries.
I agree that a ranking mechanism would be nice, but what do you mean by "fraud garbage"? I personally am not aware of any malicious package in the Racket ecosystem.
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that was indeed problematic. We kinda fixed this issue a while back by obfuscating emails (https://github.com/racket/racket-pkg-website/pull/88), but it doesn't help with already scraped emails. Also, the raw emails are still technically readable if one knows where to look at.
Racket was always one of my favorite Lisp / Scheme dialect, mainly because of its very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort, that and Dr Racket lets you see visually where import goes into code, and a bunch of other nice things.
Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages!
That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to.
With AI becoming so predominant, I wonder if dynamically typed languages will lose favorability? Seems to me like a heavily documented, statically typed language is going to be ideal for AI programming. I'm wondering what role these flexible, coder-friendly, dynamically typed languages will play in the years to come.
That is a really good question. My personal intuition is that LLMs do well with any language as long as you set up for fast syntax checking tools, access to either a REPL or very fast to run tests, etc.
I usually use small local models, and the work to set up very concise skills and efficient tooling is a big part of the fun. I have also adopted the practice of writing my own custom coding harnesses (these can be less than 2000 lines of code, not the huge project you might expect.)
Rhombus is what Racket should have been, back when it was the learning language at MIT, before it became Python. Had it been like this, maybe Python would have never gained traction within that community. The world would have been a very different place.
Rhombus' syntax is soooo beautiful. As a Racketeer, it's my dream language.
All the power of Racket... without a Lots of Insipid, Stupid Parenthesis.
Not that I don't like the parens, mind you, but Rhombus looks so much more... 2009. My only regret is that nobody will use Rhombus, except a few enthusiasts, for fun. In an AI age, new programming languages should really be LLM-first, sadly. But it makes me so happy that there are some people who still care about humans coding.
I love Racket, and have a ton of Racket code I have written over the years. When I get home from a vacation I will have an AI translate a small sample of my Racket code to Rhombus: easiest way for me to play with the language.
Python has remained in the top 5 (often near or at the top) most used programming languages for years. Meaningful whitespace is not stopping people from using it in enough numbers to make it clear that it's a detriment as a language feature.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadRhombus is easy to use and uniquely customizable.
See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html for the release announcement and highlights.
https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus
Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages!
That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to.
The entire Rhombus repo is all Racket:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++languag...
Building languages was always one of selling points racket tried to push; the "Language-Oriented Programming Language" slogan and all.
I usually use small local models, and the work to set up very concise skills and efficient tooling is a big part of the fun. I have also adopted the practice of writing my own custom coding harnesses (these can be less than 2000 lines of code, not the huge project you might expect.)
Rhombus' syntax is soooo beautiful. As a Racketeer, it's my dream language. All the power of Racket... without a Lots of Insipid, Stupid Parenthesis. Not that I don't like the parens, mind you, but Rhombus looks so much more... 2009. My only regret is that nobody will use Rhombus, except a few enthusiasts, for fun. In an AI age, new programming languages should really be LLM-first, sadly. But it makes me so happy that there are some people who still care about humans coding.
Python has remained in the top 5 (often near or at the top) most used programming languages for years. Meaningful whitespace is not stopping people from using it in enough numbers to make it clear that it's a detriment as a language feature.
But it's important to note, at you need editor support for rendindenting blocks easily and correctly.
I'm... not a super fan of rhombus' emphasis on metaprogramming beyond supporting the language itself though.