Racket was also my first exposure to lisp and I recoiled from it as well. Shortly after I ended up working in clojure for a while, which I felt "fixed" a lot of

Racket was also my first exposure to lisp and I recoiled from it as well. Shortly after I ended up working in clojure for a while, which I felt "fixed" a lot of the things I thought I didn't like about racket. I still think the clojure syntax and immutability semantics are prettier than racket's but that's just my own vanity. I'm back on racket for the reasons mentioned in the article pretty much: good fundamental language, big and practical standard library, plus every freak academic CS thing you could ever want to play with available as well. The tooling and community also encourage you to think of problems in terms of DSLs, something it partially shares with ruby as well. That approach isn't always a good fit, or one you can get buy-in for, but when it works it works well for me.