Conservancy Welcomes Racket as its Newest Member Project

June 12, 2018

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."