A Friendly Introduction to Racket
This article provides an educational overview of the Racket programming language, tracing its lineage from Lisp and Scheme. It highlights Racket's unique capabilities for language-oriented programming and its historical significance in computer science.
Why it matters
Understanding the evolution of programming languages provides context for modern software development and the historical roots of AI research.
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it." — Eric S. Raymond
Welcome. Today you'll learn a language from one of programming's oldest and most unusual families. A language where code is data, where parentheses are pure structure, and where programs can write programs. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have written your own syntax.
Lisp was born in 1958 , invented by John McCarthy at MIT. For context: it's the second-oldest high-level language still in use (only Fortran, from 1957, beats it by a year). Python arrived in 1991. JavaScript in 1995. Lisp predates them by more than 30 years and several ideas we now consider "modern" were born there:
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