edit: I dont reslly understand the downvotes, not trying to be rude or anything. Coming from CL the racket repl is very very barebones, it loses all state everytime you recompile. So I ask him how he deals with that coming from the very nice CL repl

You don't have to use DrRacket to use Racket.

People doing real work with Racket tend to have "workflow" setups that are closer to SLIME.

I personally used a simpler Emacs setup ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/"), and ended up leaning more on modules and embedded unit tests ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/overeasy/"), and less on very dynamic interactive evaluation like I'd done before.

Though, if you want to monkeypatch heavily, CL is famously good at that.

you can have a REPL in nvim/vim/tmux/screen/another terminal/or any other window , and send regions from your vim buffer to that repl

I have heard that this is not possible because Racket needs to make a stricgter separation of compile time and run time... but I am not sure whether this is actually true.

But, though I don't know current Racket internals, I'm not sure those need to be a barrier to monkeypatching that approaches CL.

Other than optimizations that make some debugging info and dynamic changes difficult-to-impossible, if the system had a mode to disable these optimizations (or to maintain some information in parallel that permits a cascading unraveling of optimizations affected by a change), I'm not aware of a fundamental reason the system couldn't support more loose poking at things.

Though, one implementation complication that Schemes do have is first-class continuations.

That said, IMO Clojure has a larger and more robust community, that said it's a bit of a bigger pain to set up (uses JVM) & has some more nuance.

What matters are ecosystems and not languages on their own, so when switching between languages it is a great benefit that I can reuse my Java ecosystem knowledge, instead of adding yet another ecosystem to those I jump around between projects.

However, I really like the almost Lisp Machine like experience from using Raket.

CLOS is way nicer than Racket's class/OO model and how generic functions are handled. Growable/resizable arrays are sometimes nice to have.

I prefer Racket and Scheme for the most part though.

I'd say this counts as a phenomenal contribution. :)

I'm always a bit skeptical of these statements. How does it define "native"? Does it use gtk/libadwaita on Gnome and Qt on KDE? What about windows, does it use Win32, WPF, WinUI2 or WinUI3, all of which could be considered "native"? What about platform-dependent layouts?

I return to my main calling: figuring out why people use PLT scheme without an academic incentive. There must be an answer here somewhere....

B) they haven't answered which cookie color makes them bananas for their ultraspeculated examination coming up this tuesday

C) It's meaningful the only product anyone has built from racket has been hacker news itself.

Are there any Schemes which are as "Batteries included" as Clojure with broad and deep library support? (I think Racket has quite good support!)

So, industry-grade customer-facing code? Not its focus, maybe not. But incredibly easy internal tools? Sure!

You mean it's easy to build GUI desktop apps with Racket?

I started trying to build a complex enough GUI and just quit. There are bugs and the documentation is extremely terse. You have to rely on blog posts by one developer who has sorted it all out, but it's still really difficult to get an explicit handle on the concepts and functionality. Very, very few people use the pasteboard editor for complex things or even simple things. You'll be forging a path of your own for sure.

The packet management system, the GUI IDE (which includes a step debugger), the ability to write a cross platform IDE (which is maintained by the core Racket team themselves), and the ability to easily produce runnable binaries make Racket my favorite Lisp hands down.

Those features are so incredibly useful and important, I really can't state it enough. I love Lisps, but at work, I will only use a language if it's the best tool for a job. Because of several of those features, Racket has been the only Lisp I've ever been able to justify using.

Because of the community, tooling and learning resources available, Racket is such an easy language for me personally to recommend to people. There are things I really like about CL and Clojure too, both of which I have used quite a bit, but I would never recommend them to people because of some huge drawbacks that come with each.

I also don't jive with the research parts of the language , nor do I care about the "lang" facilities, and I also kind of strongly dislike HtDP. But my perspective on all that is that they are projects I am uninterested in that happened to be made with a language I love, rather than knocks against the language itself, because I never bump up against them.

(Thank you for the book - will be reading)

The only part of the Racket distribution I can see that is specifically 'programming language research' is Redex.

In the language itself there are the metaprogramming capabilities - but all modern languages have metaprogramming.

My experience of the community is it is generally people talking about real problems.

People do use Racket for PL and other research, so a number of PL research papers and conference talks do reference Racket, but it doesn't dominate any of the discussion.

e.g. https://racket.discourse.group/t/levin-tree-search-with-cont...