Racket was designed to teach programming to young students, which unfortunately isn't a killer app for a language even though I learned a great deal from HTDP and Racket/PLTScheme.

There have been other languages that were not lisps like Dart that utterly failed or like Coffeescript, which faded away because the space that they were trying to overtake (Javascript) was already deeply entrenched.

If you can't appreciate Racket beyond it's syntax, it's unlikely that you'd appreciate it with a new syntax. Racket is academic niche in the same ways Haskell is.

If parentheses and lack of infix symbols are sufficient to keep you away from Racket and you want much of the same level of metaprogramming and macros I suggest trying out Julia, which is considerably more practical where infix expressions and operators make sense within the numerical context: Every infix operator is a function call and has a dual syntax.

But don't please don't lie to yourself that you'd ever adopt Racket if it had infix expressions. I love Racket and I still don't use it for many practical projects because the demands of work are different than academia, which I believe are the true barriers to adoption.

I'd say that the "teaching languages" were designed for teaching students, and Racket was designed as the practical tool for implementing those languages and a cross-platform IDE to support them. As a result of this, and various subsequent community work, Racket is now practical for many purposes.

I said a little more about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507549

* https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/pull/88

* https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues/3#issuecomment...

There is a lot of discussion in that repository that are not about syntax. For example "the big renaming" https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues/49 and "more immutability" https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues/22 .