Learning Racket

First Published: 2022 January 6

Draft 1

As someone who does a lot of math-adjacent work¹, I often have to do lots of repetitive calculations. Since I am easily bored, I tried to find a way to not have to do the same equation 100 times with only minor modifications. Growing up in a CS heavy household, I realized that I could try to use computers to do some of the math for me.

So, I asked my family “What language should I learn?” They responded² Python, because lots of reasons which boil down to:

• It’s easy

• It’s commonly used

But as I worked in Python, I became dissatisfied.

Anyways, flash forward to today where I’m now learning Racket. Racket is built on Scheme which is built on Lisp. Lisp is a language³ that developed in parallel to C⁴-like languages, which is based on the idea of lambda calculus.

It uses a lot of parentheses, and it has been fun to figure out how to use it. Today I wanted to see if 12 steps to the octave really is the best approximation⁵. Turns out it is in fact the best up to 47 divisions of the octave! And I did that in Racket, which is fun and exciting. If you want my⁶ code, feel free to message me.