The packet management system, the GUI IDE (which includes a step debugger), the ability to write a cross platform IDE (which is maintained by the core Racket team themselves), and the ability to easily produce runnable binaries make Racket my favorite Lisp hands down.
Those features are so incredibly useful and important, I really can't state it enough. I love Lisps, but at work, I will only use a language if it's the best tool for a job. Because of several of those features, Racket has been the only Lisp I've ever been able to justify using.
Because of the community, tooling and learning resources available, Racket is such an easy language for me personally to recommend to people. There are things I really like about CL and Clojure too, both of which I have used quite a bit, but I would never recommend them to people because of some huge drawbacks that come with each.
I also don't jive with the research parts of the language , nor do I care about the "lang" facilities, and I also kind of strongly dislike HtDP. But my perspective on all that is that they are projects I am uninterested in that happened to be made with a language I love, rather than knocks against the language itself, because I never bump up against them.
The packet management system, the GUI IDE (which includes a step debugger), the ability to write a cross platform IDE (which is maintained by the core Racket team themselves), and the ability to easily produce runnable binaries make Racket my favorite Lisp hands down.
Those features are so incredibly useful and important, I really can't state it enough. I love Lisps, but at work, I will only use a language if it's the best tool for a job. Because of several of those features, Racket has been the only Lisp I've ever been able to justify using.
Because of the community, tooling and learning resources available, Racket is such an easy language for me personally to recommend to people. There are things I really like about CL and Clojure too, both of which I have used quite a bit, but I would never recommend them to people because of some huge drawbacks that come with each.
I also don't jive with the research parts of the language , nor do I care about the "lang" facilities, and I also kind of strongly dislike HtDP. But my perspective on all that is that they are projects I am uninterested in that happened to be made with a language I love, rather than knocks against the language itself, because I never bump up against them.