What is the purpose of Racket? Is there any use for web development?
Good for use cases where you otherwise might find code written in JavaScript, Python, Clojure or Ruby.
You can do web development with Racket https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/
One thing that makes Racket somewhat special is that it can be used to build your own languages (e.g. domain specific languages) with it as it comes with the tools and a community that has experience in it.
There also is a great introduction to programming online course with Racket by Gregor Kiczales https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x
Probably anyone who would be interested knows it without its needing to be pointed out, but I mention in case it entices anyone that Gregor Kiczales is one of the authors of "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol" (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Metaobject-Protocol-Gregor-Kiczal... ; edited to remove abbreviation).
Please, what does that mean? I program in Racket, and have enjoyed the vidoes but googling this phrase suggests either Prof Kiczales likes to clean floors in an innovative way, or else he is a member of Hip-Hop group. I'm not finding either terribly credible.
as a small correction though, it really doesn't teach racket in terms of #lang racket. it uses a succession of teaching languages that are implemented as #lang languages in racket. however, you do pickup pieces of racket (basically racket used as just a scheme), some of the libraries/frameworks like 2htdp, and DrRacket, the ide.
https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/
My post about why I chose it: https://joelmccracken.com/entries/pollen-writing-semantic-ma...
A really good resource for understanding the motivation behind racket: https://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/
For a taste of the build code I wrote: https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast... and https://gitlab.com/JoelMcCracken/joelmccracken.com/blob/mast...
Many have made the statement "Lisp/Scheme is the best programming language ever!"
Early on, I started doing an incomplete implementation of Arc more like what one of the parent comments suggested, and the working title was "morc: Mock Arc Programming Language as Scheme Extension". I just wanted to learn Arc, while learning Scheme macros better.
Besides possibly adding to the confusion over the relationship between Arc and Racket (or PLT Scheme), my poor choice of title caused at least one community member to be upset, that I would mock (insult) Arc. When I meant only to be self-deprecating of my own exercise, like a poor-imitation or approximation, and not to seem to presume to be implementing a full Arc this way.
I've personally worked on a few industry Web "full-stack" projects in Racket -- including an important large server-heavy system that accomplished something on AWS that no one had yet done before, and a very complex data model HTML5 Offline app (which I did as a mixture of generated and Web services) -- that would not have been possible any other way with the developer resources available. I also used Racket for smaller Web tasks, as a researcher, to whip up a browser-based labeling UI for a large corpus (the corpus was also Web-scraped and massaged by Racket), and to save a big conference demo when the big Java server someone had made could not be deployed on the two-laptop LAN that would be available.
But if a bunch of people hear "Racket is great for Web development" without being more specific, they will run to go look at it, then they will be confused, then they will run at you with pitchforks.
Racket is potentially great for a startup doing a non-cookie-cutter MVP for which they'll have to be clever and invent some things in any case. But Racket is not going to be some variation on some currently-popular framework you already know (maybe it can be backend for one of the frontend frameworks), and you're going to have to write some code to do exactly what you want, not just glue together off-the-shelf components.
For the frontend, there's Clojurejs.