As an imperative, stateful and even sometimes OOP developer, always finding functional programming very elegant but never really using it for real, Racket was the Lisp dialect that finally hooked me in.<p>I think the reason was because it came with batteries included and I could create complex applications using only the standard library or very few packages.
While I don't work with Racket much now, I will be eternally grateful for the concepts it taught, functional programming, recursion through the little schemer, how to design programs and break them up into small chunks, and writing tests. Gradual typing allowed me to make my programs more robust, and the type checking built into typed Racket helped catch errors without having to run a separate utility like mypy.<p>The community isn't the largest, but you can still get an answer to the questions that you have, and having a GUI built in the standard library (which is rare amongst Schemes) allowed me to do some pretty cool things like implement Conways game of life <a href="https://gitlab.com/diegocrespo/conways-game-of-life/-/tree/master" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/diegocrespo/conways-game-of-life/-/tree/m...</a>.
I've been keeping an eye on Racket for a few years now, and recently gave their documentation tool Scribble[1] a try, as an alternative to writing LaTeX directly. But honestly I found the experience difficult if you need some custom behavior, and falling back to Racket was very confusing as a relative newcomer to Lisp (with mostly Elisp experience). It doesn't help that their documentation, while detailed, is not very beginner friendly. So I went back to org-mode for exporting to PDF via LaTeX.<p>Congrats on the release!<p>[1]: <a href="https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/</a>
If anyone missed it, Racket has finally (it has been planned and worked for few years now) moved by default to Chez Scheme (ie Racket CS) on v8.0 (Feb 2021) which has improved in most cases performance.
For me, Racket will always be the language used to create the best programming pun of all times:<p>> Write your next Ethereum Contract in Pyramid Scheme<p>> I create Pyramid: A dialect of the Scheme programming language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM). Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket.<p><a href="http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethereum-contract-in-pyramid-scheme.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethere...</a>
I think Racket is the only modern lisp which has a sufficiently large community. What, if any, do you think should be the flagship project for introducing Racket?
Got a couple of questions - what's that IDE like, and how's Racket compared to Clojure?<p>I'm a newb to the paradigm, but fiding it useful to understand Javascript better.<p>Thanks.