I dunno, I've programmed professionally in both Racket and Common Lisp and would only choose Racket if I was implementing a DSL or something (and I would never choose CL for anything). The heavyweight syntax and dynamic nature are really only worth it in programs that are modifying the AST very frequently. I think a statically type functional language such as OCaml, F#, or Scala are much more suited for general purpose programming. I might be weird, but if I'm dealing with a Lisp codebase that is over, say, 10 kloc, I get a distinct feeling of unease, though this applies to really any dynamic language as well. The productivity and performance benefits of an expressive type system cannot be understated.