A Racket Perspective on Research, Education, and Production - Matthew Flatt

Matthew Flatt explains how the Racket project balances and integrates the competing goals of academic research, education, and production use.

It’s natural to think of research, education, and production as having competing goals. In programming-language design, for example, the needs of beginning students can differ greatly from the needs of practicing programmers, while research may explore ideas that are not yet worked out enough for either audience. With a shift in perspective, however, we can not only balance these goals but have them reinforce each other. The developers of Racket have integrated all three directions from the beginning (and now for 24 years). We’ll talk about opportunities, challenges, results, and outlook based on that experience.