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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Having used Racket in college for programing language ecosystem, I can say I don't enjoy that aspect either haha. Racket is easy to get started with and definitely great at what it does. If you're wading into Lisp IMO it's the way to go.

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.

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Uses the JVM is exactly why Clojure is the Lisp like language I mostly bother with.

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.

IMHO, the Lisp Machine experience is completely different. Those have zero educational aspects, they were designed to write large, and stateful, applications, where the Lisp Machine OS is the big stateful object-oriented operating system (like Symbolics Genera). Interlisp-D is even more different.

One feeling I have is that while Clojure is incredibly tasteful, well-designed and elegant, it is less focused on Correctness as Racket. And this gives me the feeling that if I make some mistake (say, erroneously swapping arguments of a complex function that e.g. computes on list as sets), I do not know what is going to happen.

Clojure's biggest advantage, integration with the JVM ecosystem, is also its biggest drawback. JVM compatibility forces a lot of ugly compromises on Clojure.

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