I don't think it's a coincidence that the mid-90s was a hot time for language design: the CGI-bin protocol of the Web suddenly made it possible to write code in

I don't think it's a coincidence that the mid-90s was a hot time for language design: the CGI-bin protocol of the Web suddenly made it possible to write code in any language you wanted and distribute the results, even with a loosely graphical interface, painlessly to clients (in the sense they didn't need to install anything). I call it the "Cambrian explosion of languages". Though Racket was not created for that purpose, it's unsurprising that many others from that era were linked to the Web.