Why Racket? Why Lisp?

Python has at least 3 features that are not needed in languages that have proper support for anonymous functions and that are more expression oriented:

1. for comprehensions

2. the with statement

3. decorators

You cannot work efficiently with higher-order functions until you have anonymous multi-line functions, period - also, Python's single-line lambdas would be a lot more useful if Python wouldn't have been so statement oriented, unfortunately in practice they are useless.

In regards to your points:

a) no, I don't buy that

b) ordering matters, we read code as we are reading text, top-down, left to right

It's one of the best introductions to basic and advanced (and then even more advanced) programming there is. This book, along with a series of "The Little Schemer", "The Seasoned Schemer" and "How to design programs" use Scheme as a language, and Racket makes it particularly easy to follow them by providing special environments (#langs) crafted for them.

This article is fairly misguided. I find it painful that everybody who writes about a Lisp offshoot (Scheme, Clojure, ...) ends up misrepresenting Common Lisp.

To sum up "Why Lisp?" from a CL perspective: CL has pretty much every feature of every programming language around, only that its better designed, implemented and generally more powerful. It's just a poweruser language. Its not just macros, sexps and lambdas. Its also number types, arrays, OOP, symbols, strings, structs, dynamic/lexical variables, lambda lists, multiple return values, on-line disassemble, exceptions, restarts, MOP, metacircular definition, great implementations, great libraries...... the list goes on and on... I surely forgot a ton of great stuff. TL;DR: CL got everything. And this "everything" is designed so well that its extensible and no CL programmer ever needs to doubt that any new feature can be implemented easily in CL.

To correct a few of the wrong statements of OP:

> “Wait—I love state and data mu­ta­tion. Why would you take them away?” Be­cause they’re false friends.

CL is NOT particularily functional. Just because we know how to write good side-effect free code, doesn't mean its a functional language. (We jave SETF after all, failed to mention that aove).

> a syn­tax trans­for­ma­tion in Racket can be far more so­phis­ti­cated than the usual Com­mon Lisp macro.

Outright wrong. The only reason Scheme has weird macro systems is because its a Lisp 1. CL is designed well (thus being a Lisp 2), and thats why its simple but ultimately more powerful macro system can work.

> A macro in Com­mon Lisp is a func­tion that runs at com­pile-time, ac­cept­ing sym­bols as in­put and in­ject­ing them into a tem­plate to pro­duce new code.

This is so wrong I had to write this comment. A macro in Common Lisp is a COMPILER, it accepts arguments and returns an SEXP. It is infinitely powerful, it can do EVERYTHING.

The main advances IMO have come in the areas of IDEs, build systems, and language ecosystems.

I'm a mediocre programmer at best who's done a bunch of Lisp in the past. I loved using it, but these days I rely on Ruby for getting things done because it gives me what I need from Lisp backed up with a package system that just works. I'd rather work in Lisp, but I can make more progress in Ruby.