[Xophmeister]

I write Python, amongst other things, professionally and have been playing with Racket in the sidelines. I recently started a new project and decided to take the plunge and write it entirely in Racket, so I can actually learn it better: its (extensive) standard library, idioms, quirks, etc. in a real (rather than toy) engineering setting.

Now I love Racket. Whether it’s Racket, or Scheme, or Racket facilitating Scheme, it doesn’t matter, I haven’t had so much fun coding for a long long time! Of course my job isn’t concerned about my enjoyment (at least not primarily), but it turned out to be no harder to code the project than it would have been in Python.

I’m heavily biased towards functional style and I appreciate that this is completely anecdotal, but I’d urge people to jump in :) It took me about a week to become productive in the language and, to be honest, most of that was getting over S-expression syntax and correctly pairing deeply nested parentheses. The documentation alone is a thing to behold! While it’s true that the community is smaller than Python’s, it’s friendly and eager to help; say on StackOverflow, r/Racket or IRC.

I hope I can continue writing it professionally and can convince others in my team to adopt it.

[tartoran]

Ive been programming for 20 years and recently started playing in racket and all my faded enthusiasm sprung back and got excited about programming again. Is it that its a new thing to me and we like new shiny things? Well, I find thats not the case. To me it feels that I can express ideas/idioms much much easier within Racket/scheme and after a few weeks i started enjoying the parens quite a bit. I’ve also been playing with htdp libraries and it’s been quite fun, simple and effective. My new personal projects are going to be in Racket now.