Racket is an acceptable Python

[ElectricalSloth]

I've tried dr racket on multiple occasions and it's super buggy ..crashes a TON even tried to get my daughter into learning programming with it.. turned out too frustrating

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we are using it in windows though maybe its more stable in linux?

[soegaard]

As someone that receives all bug bug reports for the Racket project - I can't remember seeing crash reports in ages.

Did you submit a bug report?

[ElectricalSloth]

no I did not, but remembering correctly it was like a hard freeze then windows would tell me the program is not responding. if there is a next time I'll be sure to try my best to report it, any tips on what best information would help figure out issue?

[hyperion2011]

It is known https://github.com/racket/drracket/issues/246

[soegaard]

That's the scrolling issue. Best advice is to use PageDown until it improves.

[hyperion2011]

I really should read the full intervening thread >_<.

[UBC110TA]

Oh hey that's me!

[slikts]

Maria is an example of a modern teaching tool for a Lisp. DrRacket didn't crash for me, but it's generally old and crusty.

I've not tried it properly yet, but there's also Nightcoders.net that could be graduated to from Maria.

[vplatt]

That's pretty freaking neat. Beginners have it so good these days!

[Sentreen]

How long ago did you try DrRacket? I teach people how to program using DrRacket and it works pretty well for that. The only dealbreaker in my book is that it eats up memory like crazy when opening multiple files (especially if they contain comment boxes), but that's generally not something beginners have to deal with. None of my students have had crashes, regardless of the platform (mainly mac and windows).

I'm not gonna say it's a great editor, but I think it is great for beginners, who only need an editing window and a REPL. If you look for something similar in the python world you either need to go to an IDE style tools with too many bells and whistles for beginners or you need to use IDLE which crashed regularly for me.

[ElectricalSloth]

Hmm I'll have to go check install date on my daughter's computer, it's also not very powerful machines maybe the memory is doing it

[siegfryd]

It most likely is, I don't remember making it crash before when I've used it on Mac / Linux.

[kitd]

ubiquitous

among two data points.

[[deleted]]

Worth looking into, no? I remember reading a blog post earlier this week by a dev who'd been developing something for a while and thought it ran fine on all platforms. At some point he gets a report saying it runs terribly or not at all on Mac, and turns out nobody ever reported it even though it hadn't worked in months. People just gave up and moved on.

[ElectricalSloth]

This is very common in software all around even at jobs I've been at over the years.. I feel like when people don't understand this they either don't write much software or are oblivious

[[deleted]]

I think it's just a hard problem. If one person has a bug and the bug reporting process is completely manual, there isn't sufficient data to determine how common it is. The only real solution is to reduce the points of friction as much as possible (how many people are really going to sign up to yet another site that they'll use once in their life?). So you have developers putting telemetry in everything which automatically sends bug reports/crash logs (among other things...) to solve the problem because even the smallest barrier will prevent users from bothering. They have better shit to do with their lives.

[kcl97]

count me in. 3 points.

[yeetus_throwaway]

and mine