Conservancy Welcomes Racket as its Newest Member Project

[Deb Nicholson]

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/jun/12/racketjoins/

Software Freedom Conservancy and the Racket community are pleased to
announce that Racket is Conservancy's newest member project. Racket is
a general-purpose programming language as well as the world’s first
ecosystem for developing and deploying new languages. Racket comes with
special support for novices and for on-boarding beginners. Several
popular online learning platforms include Racket courses. The Realm of
Racket is also a great place for programmers who want to become
familiar with the basics of the language.

Racket was launched in 1995 as an educational environment. It is still
widely used by educators, but it has also grown into a programmable
programming language. As such, it is often used to quickly prototype
embedded (domain-specific) languages. Its innovative features have
influenced the development of Clojure and Rust, many other languages.
Development is ongoing with this summer bringing big internal changes
as the project prepares to move from a C-based run-time system to one
based on Chez Scheme.

Conservancy, a public charity focused on ethical technology, is home to
over forty member projects dedicated to developing and promoting free
and open source software. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella,
allowing member projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without
having to manage their own corporate structure and administrative
services.

"We look forward to a productive collaboration with the Software
Freedom Conservancy. We're always working to improve the Racket
language and its implementation. Joining the Conservatory will help
Racket's organization and administration keep pace." says Matthew Flatt
of the newly formed Project Leadership Committee.

"It's always exciting to bring in a new member project but we rarely
get to bring in a project that has also already inspired so many other
important free software programming languages and pedagogic tools.
We're very excited to support Racket's unique and critical role in the
creation of languages and the education of the next generation of
programmers." says Deb Nicholson, Director of Community Operations at
Conservancy.

Conservancy's Distinguished Technologist, Bradley M. Kuhn added:
"Earlier in my career, I had the pleasure of using Racket's IDE (then
called DrScheme) to aid in secondary education in the 1990s and have
more recently tutored friends who wanted to learn programming using the
modern Racket environment. Racket is an essential component of computer
science education, and I'm proud that Racket is now part of our
organization." 

-- 
Deb Nicholson <deb at sfconservancy.org>
Software Freedom Conservancy