Racket v9.3
blog.racket-lang.org
blog.racket-lang.org
Racket is great! The runtime is reasonably fast, and the standard library is exceptionally featureful, including, for example, a decent plotting library, an HTTP server, decent HTML and JSON support, several forms of multi-threading, and a quite good FFI, all of which Herbie uses extensively. I suppose the parentheses are a question of taste (I like them!) but a lot of the specific syntactic decisions, like the `for` and `match` macros, are quite nice.
Clojure tends to use them very heavily though, and last I looked it seemed like Racket used more lists (as a matter of community preference, not forced by the language).
(define abc:def 3)
(define :ghi 4)
(* abc:def :ghi) ; => 12
(eq :foo keyword:foo) ; => t
That said, I don't quite know what to think of your third sentence:
> Clojure tends to use them very heavily though, and last I looked it seemed like Racket used more lists
I suppose them refers to keywords? But Racket uses more lists compared to how much Clojure uses keywords? As lists have more uses than keywords that seems likely, though as I said: I don't know anything about Clojure or Racket apart from Racket once being called PLT Scheme.
https://doc.guix.gnu.org/guile/latest/en/html_node/Keyword-R...
FWIW choosing `#:foo` over, say, `foo:` was due to backwards compatibility. In Scheme and Racket `foo:` is a legal identifier, so there might have been programs that stopped working, if `foo:` suddenly was a keyword.
On top of this they have maintained an open source project for 20+ years _as volunteers_.
If you're going to get excited about academics being pissy and condescending to their rivals, you're going to eliminate an awful lot of useful things from your life when you peek behind the curtain at the conversations between the makers.
Personally, I find academic pissing matches far, far less offensive than the self-agrandizing bullshitting we find in industry. Look hard enough, and there are people being at least occasional jerks everywhere.