Racket meet-up Saturday 7 May 18:00 UTC :racket:

Here's a summary of the meeting as I remember it.

Peter Schmiedeskamp (@peat) showed us how to install Racket on Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab. As far as I understood, you can use Jupyter Notebooks in this environment, but you don't have "real" shell access, so Peter's workaround is to execute shell commands from a Jupyter Notebook to install a Conda environment, in which then Racket and IRacket are installed.

Peter then showed a second Jupyter notebook with some Racket examples, including graphical output. This looked pretty nice! :slight_smile:

You can find more links on Peter's work at his recent post.

Relatedly, we discussed using Racket for Data Science. I don't remember much now, only that Hazel Levine's Sawzall library was mentioned, which provides a data frame implementation for Racket. Other attendants, please add what I forgot. :slight_smile:

After that, I talked about my Racket Glossary project. It started from the very long thread here on Discourse. The idea of this project is to hopefully counter somewhat the feeling of being overwhelmed by the Racket Reference after having learned the basics of Racket from the Racket Guide. I collected a lot of terms and categorized them in three categories (basic, intermediate, advanced), so you can start with the "basic" concepts and then turn to the intermediate and advanced stuff later.

So far, only a few entries in the glossary exist, but if you look at the Scribble document, you can see that I go beyond typical glossaries by giving more context and often examples for the glossary entries. I plan to write the entries in the "basic" category, then publish the glossary as a Racket package, then continue with the "intermediate" and "advanced" entries. I'll want feedback especially for these latter categories. :wink:

In a related discussion, I think we agreed that there's a lack of "intermediate" documentation, i.e. on how do you continue with Racket once you're through the Racket Guide. You can find several Scheme/Racket introductions, but I have never seen, for example, a document that describes how to structure Racket programs.

We also talked a bit about the Racket Wiki. Information in the wiki seems to be rarely found when you do a web search on a Racket topic. Also, there were different opinions on what the wiki is or should be used for.

That's all I remember right now. What did I forget? :slight_smile:

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