[racket] Common Lisp or Racket?

I had exactly that choice to make a few years ago. I chose Racket
(well, PLT Scheme at the time). I'm very happy I did.  At the time, my
reasons were:

- Racket seemed more consistently designed, CL felt more by-committee
(my impression)
- Racket seemed more pleasing to me esthetically. Including details
like `pred?` not `pred-p`.
- Single namespace (lisp1); contributes to the preceding, e.g no funcall #' jazz
- DrRacket IDE (at the time, simultaneously configuring and learning
emacs/slime felt like too much).
- Batteries-included libraries.

The last two helped me focus on more important things like, "where do
all these parentheses go?", and "how the heck am I supposed to loop
without mutation?", and so on. ;)

Those were my subjective impressions then. Without starting any flame
war I'd say they turned out to be largely accurate. Nothing is
perfect, but Racket has been a joy.

The more time I've spent with Racket, the more sense I can make out of
other lisps, so it turned out well overall.

Although there are some older deprecated parts, you probably won't
notice any "pork" as you put it.

If you get into certain corners of Racket like advanced macrology, you
may encounter a few things like
`splicing-expand-local-identifier-syntax-lifting-transformer`, but
that's an exaggerated example I completely made up :).

Seriously, Racket has turned out to be as clean, well-designed, and
fun to use as I first hoped.


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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