[kaushalvivek]

I had a professor at college who mandated Racket as the mode of learning for a software engineering course. I remember how Racket just ended up taking centre stage, figuring language-specific concepts and hacks out let the larger engineering concepts fade into the background.

I did not learn much in that course.

[chongli]

They used it improperly then. Racket is used for the first year intro CS courses at my school. They do not use the full language! They use the beginning student [1] and intermediate student [2] versions of the language.

These are highly restricted teaching versions of Racket which do not include the vast majority of the language features. They also use beginner friendly names such as first and rest instead of the cryptic car and cdr. These languages allow students to learn functional programming and basic concepts such as recursion, linked lists, association lists, higher order functions, trees, and graphs without worrying about programming language details such as side effects, fixed size numeric types, memory allocation, pointers, macros, compilers, etc.

For that purpose, Racket seems pretty hard to beat! For the professors, it also has the (nice) side effect that many students with previous programming experience are less likely to have learned Racket (or any functional language for that matter). This has been argued to put the students with and without programming experience on a more equal footing.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/beginner.html

[2] https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/intermediate.html

[justinpombrio]

For those thinking "you can do that in any language, just teach a subset of the language": no you can't! The Beginning Student Language (BSL) and Intermediate Student Language (ISL) are subsets of Racket in the sense that you can take any BSL or ISL program and run it in Racket and get the same result. If the program does not error. But if it errors, BSL and ISL will sometimes give better error messages, which they can do because the're simpler languages.

For example, consider the program `((+) 1 2 3)`. Racket gives a runtime error "application: not a procedure" because (+) evaluates to 0, which is then applied to "1 2 3", which errors because 0 is not a procedure. But BSL can give a (helpful) syntax error, because it doesn't have higher-order functions.

(I feel like someone's going to tell me that BSL or ISL isn't a subset of Racket for some obscure reason. They're at least essentially subsets.)

[priime0]

> They use the beginning student [1] and intermediate student [2] versions of the language.

To elaborate, one of the further benefits of multiple student languages like these is that concepts are taught incrementally. For instance, in the beginning student language, lists are explicitly shown as `(cons a (cons b '()))` before they are shown as `(list a b)` in intermediate student language.

[BeetleB]

My introductory course was in C/C++. I already had programming experience, but for those that didn't - your statement would apply well to it as well.

So many concepts got in the way of actually learning programming: You have to include header files for basic I/O to work. You need to understand functions to get any program to work. Pointer syntax sucks. Strings are complicated.

Coming from BASIC and QB, the barrier to entry in C/C++ was way too high. To be frank, Racket is more suitable, even if it's not the best option.

[goda90]

My professor for "Programming Language Concepts" was a contributor to Racket and it was center stage of the class. He did his lectures in DrRacket. He did a great job building up from principles to explain things, but was also very opinionated and had very high standards for homework. It was a tough class for me.

[paulddraper]

Did we go to the same college? :)

In seriousness, Racket is semi-commonly used in educational settings. Especially for "functional programming"-type courses.

[armchairhacker]

Can you give specific examples?

I’m not doubting you. I’m interested in what parts of Racket could be confusing to beginners, maybe to make better courses

[dangrover]

Northeastern, Rice?

[stephenhuey]

He went to IIIT Hyderabad if I found the right Samsung-associated guy of the same name on LinkedIn. I went to Rice when Racket was Scheme and definitely it got pushed hard on me, at least in the intro CS course. :) But that was back when CS was one of the smallest majors, and now it's the largest at Rice and their curriculum is quite different!