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Racket gets in your head like nothing else. Once you learn it, (Scheme does this too) you get x-ray vision to see every other language modulo syntax.

I have been writing Elixir professionally for the bulk of my career. (It’s been pretty awesome!) Despite this, I consider Racket to be my native language because it’s so easy for me to think in Racket. It’s the perfect bridge between my brain and the problem domain.

I have spent a lot of time in the PL space and I just cannot wrap my head around the love of Racket. I absolutely love the innovation that comes out of the community though! The gradual types system work, nanopass, embeddable DSLs are all fabulous so I like to keep tabs on what they are cooking up.

I recently picked up Essentials of Compilation by Jeremy Siek, perhaps his book and lectures will make something click for me.

In the meantime Julia has been my happy medium for a “lisp”.

Racket - the Language-Oriented Programming Language - version 9.2 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org

See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/05/racket-v9-2.html for the release announcement and highlights.

If you are using rackup you can upgrade with `rackup upgrade`

Don’t forget to migrate your packages with raco pkg migrate 9.1

I’m thankful for Racket - it got me regularly programming in lisp by virtue of LeetCode accepting it as one of its languages.

I did start to feel Racket’s “wordiness” towards the end - it started to feel a bit like COBOL. I’ve since moved onto Clojure and really appreciate the shorter keywords/function names/fewer parenthesis.

I still miss for/fold though - that thing is an absolute machine.

Northeastern graduates assemble!

Racket is cool, has nice features, simpler than Common Lisp and comes with an editor which is nice. I'm always somewhat jealous and want to use it.

But it's really hard to give up the raw power of Common Lisp and ability to write low-level code. Even if the language and tooling is all more complicated.

Racket is an amazing language for prototyping ideas that you don't understand yet.

At $dayjob I'm using it to test what novel geometries of deep learning models would look like. Being able to redefine any part of the stack for any reason is a superpower you don't know you need until you do.

A great place to start is the little learner which holds your hand until you get opinionated about what the underlying primitives should look like. E.g. what if we used sparse tensor representation?

I used a predecessor of this almost thirty years ago to learn Scheme and work trough the book SICP. The Racket maintainers still ship updates and new features, that’s remarkable.

Scheme is a wonderful lisp dialect. It taught me basics of functional programming, about closures, about tail call recursion, about functions always returning values (which annoyed me a lot when I started learning Python, where .append or .sort returened `none` instead of the list, and were destructive).

So I have very fond memories of Racket (then DrScheme) and Scheme. Had also written my matrix multiplication library and my CAS system to mimic the functionality of my HP28s calculator.

Have to look into it again.

Racket is my favorite language, unfortunately I still use python the most mainly because of the ecosystem. https://xkcd.com/353/