[zodiac]

That's a good point.

I wonder if the problem is that efficient persistent arrays aren't in racket's standard library (there are some third-party libraries implementing them though). Since racket isn't a "pure FP" language, they include cons-arrays and mutable vectors, and I imagine they felt that there wasn't a need to include efficient persistent arrays in addition to those.

[lostcolony]

Sort of - consider when Lisp originated. The heritage/age comes from a time before the research in persistent data structures happened, or even the issues with mutability were fully known. Because of that, idiomatic Lisp tends to be mutable, and no one is writing a new Lisp who isn't already familiar with another one. That's not to say immutability isn't worthwhile there, or that no Lisp standard libraries support it, but mutability tends to be the default assumption from what I've seen.

[phyrex]

I don’t know about that; clojure was specifically created with persistent data structures in mind, and it’s definitely as much a lisp as racket is

[lostcolony]

I inserted 'tends' everywhere intentionally.