[racket] Common Lisp or Racket?

Racket is truely a great and cleaner Lisp. It's carved out its own path
that I find quite attractive and am enjoying my forays into Racket.

I would recommend you just get started with The Little Schemer to get a
taste, move on to How To Design Programs. There is a Coursera course that
uses HTDP, although I haven't taken it myself, is probably easier to stick
with than going through HTDP on your own. Realm of Racket is a nice book
but best read after you've already had some experience with a Lisp dialect.

Find or plan a project using Racket as your main coding language to help
you use and grow with it. For example I'm using Racket to develop programs
for the Coursera Bioinformatics Algorithm course.

However, I want to tell you that Common Lisp resources has plenty of
valuable information to learn even if you don't end up using CL regularly.
I'm not really a CL user but I still read a lot of CL books for interesting
Lisp history and techniques.

Racket is also especially nice that it has a strong academic and
theoretical community with high quality written papers which are good
source of material to understand more about language design and usage.


On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Lawrence Bottorff <borgauf at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm your typical newbie who is hand-wringing over what direction to go in
> the general functional programming world. Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell?
>
> Of late I've been trying to get through the Barski book, "Land of Lisp,"
> but I'm really seeing now why Scheme was created: CL seems to have a ton of
> gnarl that is part-functional, part-whatever, leaving me wondering and
> neurotic. And so I'm trying to understand some esoteric, arcane Lisp
> printing/file management weirdness -- which I'm told is not proper
> functional style -- after I've just been introduced to yet another CL map
> variation, after (funcall thunk). So I guess I'd like your advice vis-a-vis
> Racket. Q: Is Racket "cleaner," or is full of pork too? Or have I just got
> the wrong book for a beginner?
>
> I understand that Barski is slavishly following the "let's get real stuff
> done" philosophy, but I'm not up to speed with functional yet to even know
> what's going on. Is your "Realm of Racket" better at this? I feel like I'm
> spinning my wheels at this point. . . .
>
> LB
>
>
>
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