I’m waiting for my flight back from Racket School 2018, so I figured I might as well recommend the event while it’s still fresh. Basically, Racket School is a week long conference/workshop about Racket, the programming language. It’s run by the creators of Racket: Matthias Felleisen, Robby Findler, and Matthew Flatt. For anybody who learned Racket in school, that may seem a little odd–“Racket, you mean that language I used in Intro CS five million years ago?” But in reality Racket is far far more than just another Lisp in the Scheme family. It’s a programming language built around designing and building other languages.

What does this mean? Basically, Racket has a lot of first class support for designing small, domain-specific-languages (DSLs). Racket practices a paradigm called language oriented programming. The way a Racket programmer attacks a problem is by designing a small DSL to solve it. It’s a very intriguing approach to programming and actually more common than you’d think. For instance, Ruby on Rails essentially uses a DSL to define model associations and routing. Or JSX, which is a DSL for designing component hierarchies.

At Racket School they basically indoctrinate you into the cult of Racket. They do this by teaching you various uses of Racket, centered around a particular theme. Last year it was designing the semantics of programming languages. This year, it was more focused on the general design of programming languages. This meant that they taught us topics such as:

• Macros/compile time functions. Granted, pretty familiar to most Lisp programmers, but Racket has some neat ways of designing macros (error handling actually works!).

• How to use macros to create small languages with different features.

• How modules can be languages and vice versa. You pretty much import a language in Racket, which means that Racket projects often have multiple files in different languages (that sounds confusing, but trust me, it isn’t).

• How to write a parser and add non S-expression syntax to a language using a language called brag. Essentially you can write Backus-Naur and it works perfectly. Also includes some ergonomics that other parser generators like bison/yacc don’t have (in my opinion).

• Writing a type checker using a language called turnstile. Turnstile allows you to write essentially the type rules and have it typecheck. For instance, this is valid turnstile:

  [(_ f e …) ⇐ t ≫ [⊢ e ≫ e- ⇒ tin] … [⊢ f ≫ f- ⇐ (-> tin … t) ]

  [⊢ (#%app f- e- …)]] Granted, it’s a little APL-esque, but it’s still really cool.

• How to implement Prolog in Racket. Okay….to be quite honest I got very lost on that one. But it was still very neat.

The best part of this? They sponsor students (both undergrad and grad) to come. They will reimburse flights and give you free housing. And since I have little to no experience in programming languages, and am only an undergrad, yet managed to get funded, I’m pretty sure most to all of the grad/undergrad kids on this list could get funded.

But why should you go? Well recently, I had found myself kind of spinning my wheels with programming languages. I had made some decent progress in parsing…but that’s kind of like making a really really good first sentence in your essay. Great, but you now need to write the rest of the paper. A lot of PLT is really intimidating, with a lot of dense theory involved. This past week gave me a really good view of the way forward. In a gist, Racket School is a really good way to get an excellent high level view of how to develop programming languages.

TL;DR: Go to Racket School, they will fund you and you will learn so much your head will explode with lambdas.

Best, Nicholas