[racket-dev] racket vs. scheme vs. clojure (as it appears to others)

This is just one random guy, but it's interesting to see how Racket is perceived.

Excerpts from a conversation on stackoverflow about Racket:
 	 
Thanks. And that's why I'm starting to learn to dislike Scheme, despite everything else. – MCXXIII yesterday

In that case, it's a good thing that Racket isn't Scheme. – John Clements 20 hours ago 

I don't know if I'd like to turn to some "fringe" language. Also seems odd to me to call it a Scheme implementation if it's not meant to be Scheme at all. I really like standards and Scheme seems to suffer greatly in that area. I think I may have to switch to some other form of Lisp. Clojure seems potentially nice at a glance. – MCXXIII 20 hours ago

Ah! You said the magic word! Clojure is a LISP implementation in a very similar way that Racket is a Scheme implementation. Put differently: if you don't object to Clojure, there's no good reason to object to Racket. – John Clements 13 hours ago 
 	
Racket comes off as "Scheme, but not really" while Clojure comes off as "Clojure (inspired by Lisp)". At least that's the impression. It's kinda like how Java was inspired by C/C++ yet Java is Java. Also, I could go learn INTERCAL too. It wouldn't be very useful aside from the pure experience, and maybe with INTERCAL that experience would be worth it, but in the case of Racket I might as well get that exact same experience from something more "mainstream". So, if my objective is to learn some form of Lisp, I'd go with one of the three major dialects, not Racket. – MCXXIII 5 hours ago

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Obviously, Racket is still working to define itself as a separate entity. – John Clements 0 secs ago

You can see the original thread here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5806222/opening-urls-with-scheme/5811345#5811345


John Clements

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