[racket] Common Lisp or Racket?

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:56:09AM -0600, Lawrence Bottorff 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

I should mention that another, quite different approach to functional 
programming is the language OCAML.  See http://ocaml.org/ for details.

I program using Scheme and OCAML as high-level languages.

By the way, I don't do exclusively pure functional programming.  Most 
of my code is functional, but I use imperative mechanisms when 
apppropriate.  I consider that building real systems as pure 
functional code is extremism bordering on masochism.

-- hendrik