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I am not a fervent Lisper, but dropping the parentheses will take me away from the times I do go to Racket, and just go back to SBCL or Gambit or Chicken Scheme. The article admits it is to try and win more share of users, but that is not a good reason for a predominantly academic language. I would even go to Haskell, which avoids success at all costs ;)

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Ironically, I think most of Racket's popularity is driven by its Lispiness. People want to get into this 'Lisp' stuff and everyone recommends Racket. I personally learned Racket because as a dumb teen Googled "how to become a hacker".

The first result was Eric Raymond's article How To Become A Hacker, which recommended learning Lisp. I looked into Lisps and ran into the book How to Design Programs which recommended the IDE DrRacket.

They're not dropping anything. You will still be able to use the parentheses. This is essentially a proposal for an official alternate syntax.

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