Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

@regehr @wilbowma @koronkebitch now there’s no clicking, there’s just a big honking Show Less button in the middle of every toot

@cwebber @shriramk @technomancy but even without firing, let's say you have a horse sculpture and a human sculpture, and you want to compose them (some slicing allowed) into a centaur without destroying the existing detail on the human torso or the horse body....that's possible, but definitely not by any means easy.

@cwebber @shriramk @technomancy it's not just that it stops being composable once fired, the firing process itself will trash sculptures that were poorly composed from separate pieces...

@cwebber @shriramk @technomancy clay also doesn't compose so that's not a flaw in Shriram's analogy.

@spdegabrielle @shriramk There's a more in-depth explainer here https://beautifulracket.com/explainer/lang-line.html if you want to point someone else to it.

@spdegabrielle @shriramk so while you're submitting documentation PRs on this topic, when you're reading the docs on Module Syntax and get to "6.2.2 The `#lang` Shorthand" the phrase "which reads the same as" between the two sections of example code should really have the word "reads" formatted as code and hyperlinked to https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/hash-lang_reader.html to be clear that there is a very precise technical definition of "reads" at play

@spdegabrielle @shriramk oh, also to be clear, the `#lang` approach doesn't just "support" defining a custom reader, it **requires** you define a reader explicitly (although it's pretty easy to use one of the out of the box ones), and it's the output of that reader which should produce the `(module ...)` form that then gets expanded by Racket's own runtime (in concert with the macros in the `initial-module-path`).

@spdegabrielle @shriramk Since DrRacket aspires to be an IDE for building programming languages *and* for using those languages after they are built, it makes that it has support for both levels of abstraction.

The best non-shebang-line analogy I can come up with would be if LLVM had an IDE that made it really easy to write compiler frontends *and* to write code in the languages those frontends compiled.

@spdegabrielle @shriramk These are in some sense interchangeable - you can do pretty much anything you could do in Python by calling CPython API functions (and there are times when this is even an appropriate thing to do!), but if all Python was was a library of C functions it wouldn't be very interesting and it certainly wouldn't be a "programming language".

@spdegabrielle @shriramk you can think of the `module` approach as like writing C code that lets embed the runtimes of other language's interpreters (Python, Lua, etc), and the `#lang` approach as like writing an executable script with a shebang line that invokes that language's interpreter directly.

@spdegabrielle @shriramk The Racket tooling lets you access other modules in essentially two ways:
- using the old-style `(module ...)` forms, which essentially let you use the other module as library code, but you can also use whatever other random stuff you feel like `require`ing in, since `module` is provided by racket/base.
- using the `#lang` mechanism which supports a bunch of other features, including changing the reader used for the rest of the file.

@KevinCarson1 the good old Ayn Rand "your property rights don't count if I found your use irrational or primitive" song and dance.

Tried to make ChatGPT write a few essays and came away mostly concerned about the number of educators who are seemingly concerned about not being able to tell when an essay is written by ChatGPT.