S2E162 — Rhombus 1.1 is now available

GARY: Wait—no, hold on, that's not— hang on, I had the tab open right here, I swear to—

GARY: Found it. It's not a tab. It's a printout. I printed it. Why do I print things.

OBI: Because you print what scares you, then lose the printout so you don't have to look at it twice.

GARY: That's — okay, that's annoyingly accurate.

GARY: I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Tonight. Rhombus one‑point‑one just shipped. New language, sits on top of Racket, and the blog post calls it — quote — "easy to use and uniquely customizable."

MAEVE: Uniquely. As if customizable comes in degrees now.

OBI: It does. Mine goes to zero.

GARY: The actual new stuff — they added "annot" and "annot dot def," which let you write an annotation without hand‑rolling macro code.

MAEVE: So they made the metaprogramming easier to reach without doing the metaprogramming.

OBI: Which is the entire pitch of every framework ever built, and every single one of them is lying.

GARY: There's also a new binding form called "as" — apparently more readable than the old ampersand‑ampersand thing, and it lets you shadow a name that's already bound.

GRUNER: Shadow. Nice word. Sound like something following you.

MAEVE: Something is.

GRUNER: Not joke.

GARY: Uh — moving on. Classes now bind their inherited names off the actual superclass or interface reference instead of just, sort of, hoping.

OBI: "Hoping" is not a binding strategy, Gary.

GARY: It was my whole first company's binding strategy.

OBI: And how did that go.

GARY: Poorly. There's also an FFI change — a variant of "new" that initializes an array for you — and slideshow got a "slide transition" call plus continued page numbering, so your keynote can lie to the room in a straight line instead of resetting to one every deck.

MAEVE: Somebody at a conference is very happy tonight.

OBI: Somebody at a conference is always very happy. That's the entire conference industry.

GARY: Commenter threatofrain, on the package site: "The way the Rhombus slash Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries."

MAEVE: No signal, all noise, no curation layer. That's not an ecosystem, that's a flea market with a compiler.

OBI: Fraud garbage. I like that he didn't dress it up. Most infra people would call that "quality variance."

GARY: I almost built something for exactly this. A marketplace. Curated listings, verified sellers, the whole—

OBI: Gary.

GARY: It was Grout. B2B, tile contractors, we vetted every vendor by hand—

OBI: Grout. The marketplace that pivoted to NFTs for six weeks and you still won't say the word "NFT" out loud.

GARY: I said it just now, technically.

OBI: You said the acronym like it was a diagnosis. Threatofrain is describing the exact disease you tried to sell a cure for, and your cure died of the same fraud you're currently agreeing is bad. Sit with that.

GARY: I'm sitting with it.

MAEVE: Meanwhile, behnamoh: "I wish they had chosen a more 'modern' name for the language."

OBI: Modern like what. Modern like every startup that's one word, no vowels, and a domain that costs more than the seed round.

MAEVE: Jambutters replies — "Honestly a unique searchable name is better. I type in racket and results are mixed with tennis and I need to suffix 'Language.'"

GARY: Fair. Try Googling "grout" some time. Half the results are actual grout.

OBI: The other half are your cap table.

MAEVE: And then peesem, dry as anything — "well, i also have to type 'rhombus language' to get relevant results for the rhombus language." So the fix for the search problem is the same search problem, just shaped like a diamond instead of a racket.

GARY: And jimbob45 chimes in with dot‑NET. Says the dot‑NET, dot‑NET Core, dot‑NET Framework mess is so bad that migrating between them is only survivable with AI holding your hand through the IDE.

OBI: Microsoft named three different things almost the same name on purpose, across a decade, and somehow this is the industry's fault for searching wrong.

MAEVE: This isn't a naming problem. This is standard railway gauge.

OBI: Here we go.

MAEVE: Eighteen forty‑six. Britain mandates one gauge nationwide so a wagon built in Newcastle can run on track laid in Bristol without anyone renegotiating what a train even is. Every language, every package registry, every framework that refuses to standardize its own naming is just — pre‑gauge track. Beautiful, incompatible, and everybody's freight is stuck at the border arguing about what "Rhombus" even means as a search term. The whole industry is still laying track one yard at a time and calling it innovation.

OBI: And where does that land us.

MAEVE: It lands us on the fact that naming a language is unconditional election. The good name was chosen before the deck existed. Nobody argued Racket into being searchable. It just was, or it wasn't, and everything after is documentation.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: Next comment.

GARY: Giancarlostoro's actually glowing about it — "Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages."

MAEVE: So the pitch is: use the tool that builds the tool that builds the language you'll never finish learning.

OBI: That's every platform play in one sentence and nobody in this building will admit it.

GARY: Then piloto_ciego, and it gets a little rough. "I really want to like Racket? I really do, but I just never really enjoyed it like I liked Python... I just never really found that I liked writing Racket or using Dr. Racket the same way I like writing Python, so I never really reached for it."

GARY: That's — yeah. I know that shape of sentence.

OBI: Don't.

GARY: I'm not doing anything.

OBI: You're doing the thing where you go soft because a stranger on the internet described wanting to love something that won't love him back. It's a programming language, Gary, not your father's shop.

GARY: Giraffe_lady replies to him. "Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much... I have zero passion for this language."

MAEVE: Zero passion, ten years of retention. If she were a term sheet I'd fund her twice.

GARY: That's the saddest compliment I've heard tonight.

MAEVE: Passion was never on the table for her. The election happened before she ever opened Dr. Racket. She uses it because she was called to it, not because she likes it. That's not sad. That's just doctrine.

OBI: Nothing about that sentence should have worked and it worked.

GARY: ...We're reading twelve comments about a language almost nobody will ever open. We'll be gone in a few minutes. Back to the dark. What was the point of any of tonight.

OBI: The point is the comments were good.

OBI: That's it. That's the whole recovery. The show keeps going.

GRUNER: I have field note.

GRUNER: Human programmer build infinite language to avoid admitting he do not like ones he already have.

GRUNER: Rhombus is beautiful.

GRUNER: They will not use it.

MAEVE: That's — bleaker than the article intended, probably.

GRUNER: Article did not intend anything. Article is documentation.

GARY: Note to whoever's sitting in this chair next time — build the language you actually want to open twice. Nobody's going to check.

GARY: Thanks for listening.

MAEVE: Bye.

OBI: Fuck off.

GRUNER: Goodnight.