Of all the Lisps I've toyed with (mostly Clojure and Racket) I think I enjoy Racket the most. I wish more languages (I know some already do: Python, Processing, and others) would at least include a minimal text editor that can build and debug code - coded in the same language. Matter of fact, I've wished this were the case for Rust (and maybe D? - I guess there's a minimalist emacs for D but that's not as approachable as say Dr. Racket for newcomers), it would give them a chance to build a bare bones UI stack for Rust that is officially maintained.<p>On the other hand, my experience with Racket has been fantastic, I have not done too many significant projects, but when I toy around with it, it doesn't get in my way. I just don't have a good project for it as of yet. If I want to do web I'm already accustomed to using other web stacks so I don't see the appeal there, one thing that always surprises me is the GUI stack for Racket though, it just feels straight forward. It feels like we still haven't figured out the whole GUI thing, Electron is so popular because you can get a GUI done fairly quickly since everyone understands the front-end code so well out of the box.<p>I was also fairly impressed by Clojure. You install the package manager (Lein) and you have all you need to do any Clojure work, iirc it will go as far as installing Clojure for you. The repl approach to GUI design with Clojure was also quite interesting for me. I think Clojure and Kotlin are the only two things about the JVM that impress me these days, but that's just my opinion.
Really glad to see this book. I have shipped webapps in racket two or three times (once in typed/racket, because I was feeling especially crazy). It really was the most fun I had programming in a long time. But some of the problems I was tackling I felt like I was treading new ground - it wasn't clear if a ProxyPass to nginx was the best thing or not, it wasn't clear if this was the correct way to implement sessions or not, et cetera. I'm glad to see an authoritative book for the racket community on these topics.
To take lisp based web development to another level, what if we had a "browser" environment that embedded racket and executed sandboxed code instead of JavaScript/html? (Goes back to dreaming)
Racket is interesting, but what turns me off about the language is that they decided they needed OO for some things and they... implemented a single dispatch based system. Why would you limit yourself this way if you don't need to? Single dispatch systems force you into all kinds of "power deficiency patterns" (e.g. all double-dispatch patterns) that just wouldn't be necassary if you do multiple dispatch a la CLOS. You don't have to re-implement all of CLOS if you don't want but at least use something like generic functions instead of the inferior (and ugly in Racket) single dispatch style.