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Sibling comment already asked the important question to ask yourself, but my answer would be: Language design decisions and the typical benefits of using Scheme

Sibling comment already asked the important question to ask yourself, but my answer would be: Language design decisions and the typical benefits of using Scheme dialects or former Scheme dialects, as Racket does not consider itself a Scheme any longer, iirc. For example being able to make good use of recursion, being able to write programs more elegantly. Racket, in contrast to JS or TS, comes with lots of batteries included, therefore not requiring so many third party dependencies. Time and time again I see the Racket docs and think: "Ah Racket has got something for that/got you covered." Also it is rich in programming language concepts. You can write your programm in any of the languages that come with Racket, or you can write it with function contracts or you can use Typed Racket. At its core, it is a much cleaner and better designed language than TS will ever be due to TS' JS legacy.

mcpackieh 3y ago
> Racket does not consider itself a Scheme any longer, iirc. Racket (the language) itself is no longer a Scheme, strictly speaking, but still feels generally "schemey" in the broad scheme of lisps. However, Racket (the software package) does ship with a Scheme or two, namely R5RS and R6RS.
markstos 3y ago
I coded in Perl back when it dominated web development and came to value practical over beautiful in language choices. CPAN made Perl the best choice for many tasks and the same can be said of NPM for choosing TypeScript now, regardless of the elegance of the language. But I’m also a fan of “language tourism”. Even if one language is more practical, visiting other language cultures can make us better developers overall. I studied Haskell for a bit which gave new ideas for how I use Perl. Culturally, Haskell was using a lot of functional programming concepts and recursion. Those were possible in Perl but not popular. I’m sure there is value in studying Lisp languages for those who end working mostly in TypeScript or Rust
disconcision 3y ago
Even the racket teachpack libraries designed for education are very capable; I was able to make this structured editor with only using teachpack content without external deps: https://github.com/disconcision/fructure https://github.com/disconcision/fructure

mcpackieh 3y ago

> Racket does not consider itself a Scheme any longer, iirc. Racket (the language) itself is no longer a Scheme, strictly speaking, but still feels generally "schemey" in the broad scheme of lisps. However, Racket (the software package) does ship with a Scheme or two, namely R5RS and R6RS.

markstos 3y ago

I coded in Perl back when it dominated web development and came to value practical over beautiful in language choices. CPAN made Perl the best choice for many tasks and the same can be said of NPM for choosing TypeScript now, regardless of the elegance of the language. But I’m also a fan of “language tourism”. Even if one language is more practical, visiting other language cultures can make us better developers overall. I studied Haskell for a bit which gave new ideas for how I use Perl. Culturally, Haskell was using a lot of functional programming concepts and recursion. Those were possible in Perl but not popular. I’m sure there is value in studying Lisp languages for those who end working mostly in TypeScript or Rust

disconcision 3y ago

Even the racket teachpack libraries designed for education are very capable; I was able to make this structured editor with only using teachpack content without external deps: https://github.com/disconcision/fructure https://github.com/disconcision/fructure