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Introduction to Racket, a Lisp-family language for building languages
Key points
- Racket is a modern descendant of Lisp and Scheme.
- Lisp introduced concepts like garbage collection and first-class functions.
- Racket is designed for language-oriented programming.
- It evolved from PLT Scheme, renamed in 2010.
A Brief History of Lisp
Lisp, invented in 1958 by John McCarthy, is the second-oldest high-level language still in use. It predates languages like Python and JavaScript by decades, introducing concepts such as garbage collection, first-class functions, the REPL (read-eval-print loop), and conditionals as expressions. Lisp was also foundational for artificial intelligence research during the 1970s and 80s.
From Lisp to Scheme to Racket
In 1975, Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele created Scheme, a minimalist Lisp dialect that became popular in academia. PLT Scheme, developed in 1995 by Matthias Felleisen's group, was designed for education and programming language research. In 2010, PLT Scheme was renamed Racket, evolving into a language for building other languages, emphasizing language-oriented programming.
Key Features and Modern Use
Racket's unofficial motto is "language-oriented programming," allowing users to build custom languages. The core concept of homoiconicity, where code is a data structure, is central to Lisp-family languages. While Lisp's prominence in AI waned, its descendants like Clojure and Common Lisp are still used in various industries, including banking and flight planning.
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Reporting from
This tutorial introduces Racket, a programming language derived from Scheme and Lisp, highlighting its historical context and key features. It explains Racket's role in language-oriented programming and its evolution from earlier Lisp dialects. This matters as it provides an accessible entry point for developers interested in functional programming and language design.