How I Redex—Experimenting with Languages in Redex

Recently, I asked my research assistant, Paulette, to create a Redex model. She had never used Redex, so I pointed her to the usual tutorials:

• https://redex.racket-lang.org/
• https://docs.racket-lang.org/redex/tutorial.html
• https://docs.racket-lang.org/redex/redex2015.html

While she was able to create the model from the tutorials, she was left the question “what next?”. I realized that the existing tutorials and documentation for Redex do a good job of explaining how to implement a Redex model, but fail to communicate why and what one does with a Redex model.

I decided to write a tutorial that introduces Redex from the perspective I approach Redex while doing work on language models—a tool to experiment with language models. The tutorial was originally going to be a blog post, but it ended up quite a bit longer that is reasonable to see in a single page, so I’ve published it as a document here: