r-wos.org

 #lang racket
 (require net/url)
 (port->string
   (get-pure-port
     (string->url "http://r-wos.org")))

Racket Appreciation Day was today, for me. I tried writing a small script that reads from Github’s API and displays a list of “@mentions” in Guile.

(Why Guile? Well, the short version of the story is
that I’d like to run this program on my [Ben NanoNote](http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote)
since I have that machine lying around for quite some time now,
looking for something, *anything* to use it for.

The NanoNote comes with Guile. It also comes with Python, Bash, GForth and Lua, and I could probably cross-compile Racket for it (it’s a MIPS CPU), but yeah – I thought writing something in Guile would be interesting.)

And Guile is quite nice, as a language – but some things still made me miss Racket.

Examples are: local defines, let-values, port->string, Racket’s for loop forms, and the quality of the documentation: Guile’s docs don’t include the return value in the function signature – you have to parse the prose around it for that information. Not nice.

But what triggered this post is Guile’s absolutely stupid HTTP client. It’s reasonably easy to use, and generally works, except that it verifies the response headers.

What the fuck?! Since when are the receiving ends of clients in a network supposed to play the RFC-Nazi role? Or the receiving end of anything, really: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”, isn’t that the networking credo?

Well, not so with Guile’s HTTP client. This one throws a Bad Header exception and trashes the response if the server decided to send something that isn’t part of some RFC. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it also throws for basically everything with a Content-Location header. As an example, it refuses to accept the response you’ll get after requesting http://r-wos.org.

Okay, so now I have two options. Either I write my own http-get – which means basically writing in C, except slower, and with more parentheses. Or I use (system "curl ..."). Not nice, part two.

So here’s my tip of the day: use Racket if you can.

And just use Python or something, if you can’t.