[moron4hire]

These are really bad examples.

I sat down for a month and a half and just did Racket every day. It was a very good experience, in that I learned a lot about programming in general (Racket's OO constructs are particularly good).

These little syntax tricks aren't the point of the SExpr languages. I think beginners tend to get caught up in them, but they don't actually affect the ergonomics of the language that much and end up becoming transparent to the programmer. Translating Python to Racket is a fairly trivial process, for example.

The point of them is that they are infinitely composable, specifically programmatically. The emphasis is more on writing programs that generate themselves. Think of it like making it trivial to make your own opinionated framework on the fly that costs nothing at runtime.

In Racket, things like File IO vs Network IO can be abstracted to the same exact interface. You might use such a thing to write web services that you can test using saved sessions, and it's fairly easy to do. There is some misconception that Racket is missing a lot of libraries that I don't think is quite as bad as people think because a lot of the things you would need a library or framework for in other languages are ready enough to do on your own with a well thought out macro.