Scheme may be an ideal "teaching" language because it's so small, but it's not an ideal learning language because you will quickly run into problems with librar

Scheme may be an ideal "teaching" language because it's so small, but it's not an ideal learning language because you will quickly run into problems with libraries and implementations. The RnRS is also not as good a reference as the HyperSpec+CLtL. Common Lisp code is much more portable across implementations so there are way more libraries and bindings to things like graphics and sound around (and easily available via quicklisp). Racket OTOH is the best environment for learning to program in that I've come across, and I recommend it to people who ask me for advice about learning to program (despite being the author of that article). If Common Lisp had a similar environment for newbies it would be sweet, but not many people (myself included) care about Lisp IDEs. The problem with Racket is that it has a huge problem with NIH as a project, and a lot of the libraries are opinionated about the way you use things like state.