You're losing lots of new users to "racket: command not found"

[racket]

You're losing lots of new users to "racket: command not found"

[jbclements]

I'm curious: was this the first tutorial that you tackled? If so, what informed that choice? It would be helpful to understand how people choose an entry point.

Thanks!

[jameshfisher]

I actually didn't quite start with that - I started with one that asked me to open DrRacket. I then quickly realized that that wasn't what I wanted, so I then Googled something like "racket cli scripting".

My expectation (from learning other programming languages) is that you start with a hello world program that you run from the command line. That's what I was looking for.

More specifically, I was curious about Racket as a language to build a proof-of-concept for automatic differentiation. I figured Lisp would be good for this due to easy meta-programming.

Racket appears to be targeting a crowd that wants to work with a GUI rather than the CLI. I don't know if that's wrong, but it's not what I was looking for.

[jbclements]

I think there's an assumption that people using the command-line tools are familiar with extending their PATH env var. Also, every shell is different, and providing instructions that work for every scenario is kind of a nightmare. Perhaps you could make a pull request that adds some clarifying text?

Thanks!

[spdegabrielle]

https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki/Set-your-PATH-environment-variable
maybe

@margin-note*{Set your @tt{PATH} environment variable so you can use raco and other Racket command line functions. On macOS:@tt{sudo sh -c 'echo "/Applications/Racket v7.7/bin" >> /etc/paths.d/racket'} and 
 @tt{sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Racket\ v7.7/} to use command line tools (@tt{raco}). On Windows one of the following add the racket bin path to Path in 'Environment Variables' (under System Properties, Advanced tab)}

I made a PR racket/racket#3228

Either way I'd suggest closing or transferring this PR to https://github.com/racket/racket as the home of the More tutorial that this issue references.

Kind regards,

Stephen

[samth]

I don't think that xattr call is needed since signing should work correctly now.

[spdegabrielle]

are nightlies signed?

[spdegabrielle]

I'll remove it.

[spdegabrielle]

PR updated racket/racket#3228