Common Lisp vs Racket

Overview

Common Lisp

Stacks268

Followers255

Votes145

Racket

Stacks92

Followers83

Votes54

Common Lisp vs Racket: What are the differences?

Introduction: Common Lisp and Racket are both popular programming languages in the Lisp family, known for their powerful features and flexibility. However, they also have some key differences that set them apart from each other.

Syntax: Common Lisp has a more traditional syntax with its use of parentheses and prefix notation, while Racket allows for more flexibility with different syntaxes, such as infix and prefix, making it easier for beginners to adapt to.
Purpose: Common Lisp is widely used in AI research, language design, and system programming, while Racket is often utilized in education, research projects, and as a scripting language due to its simplicity and extensibility.
Modules and Libraries: Racket has a module system that promotes better organization and reuse of code, making it easier to collaborate on projects, whereas Common Lisp relies more on external libraries for additional functionalities.
Development Environment: Racket provides a powerful IDE called DrRacket that includes debugging tools, module browsers, and language-sensitive editors, offering a user-friendly environment for developers, while Common Lisp lacks a standardized IDE, leading to developers using third-party tools like Emacs or SLIME for development.
Community and Support: Common Lisp has a mature and active community with a wider range of libraries and resources available, making it easier for developers to find solutions and support for their projects compared to Racket, which has a smaller community and fewer resources.
Concurrency: Racket's runtime system provides built-in support for lightweight concurrency, making it easier to write parallel programs, whereas Common Lisp requires external libraries such as Bordeaux Threads for implementing concurrent and parallel programming.

In Summary, the key differences between Common Lisp and Racket lie in their syntax, purpose, module systems, development environments, community support, and concurrency capabilities.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Common Lisp	Racket
Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]	It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.
-	Multi-paradigm; Object-oriented;Cross-platform;Powerful macros & languages;DrRacket IDE & tons of documentation
Statistics
Stacks 268	Stacks 92
Followers 255	Followers 83
Votes 145	Votes 54
Pros & Cons
Pros 24 Flexibility 22 High-performance 17 Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL 13 Stable 12 Lisp Cons 4 Too many Parentheses 3 Standard did not evolve since 1994 2 No hygienic macros 2 Small library ecosystem 1 Ultra-conservative community	Pros 4 Meta-programming 3 Hygienic macros 2 Beginner friendly 2 Cross platform GUI 2 Macro Stepper Cons 2 LISP BASED 2 No GitHub
Integrations
No integrations available	Windows Oracle MySQL Cassandra PostgreSQL Linux IBM DB2 SQLite macOS Microsoft SQL Server

What are some alternatives to Common Lisp, Racket?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Related Comparisons

Common Lisp vs Racket: What are the differences?

Syntax: Common Lisp has a more traditional syntax with its use of parentheses and prefix notation, while Racket allows for more flexibility with different syntaxes, such as infix and prefix, making it easier for beginners to adapt to.
Purpose: Common Lisp is widely used in AI research, language design, and system programming, while Racket is often utilized in education, research projects, and as a scripting language due to its simplicity and extensibility.
Modules and Libraries: Racket has a module system that promotes better organization and reuse of code, making it easier to collaborate on projects, whereas Common Lisp relies more on external libraries for additional functionalities.
Development Environment: Racket provides a powerful IDE called DrRacket that includes debugging tools, module browsers, and language-sensitive editors, offering a user-friendly environment for developers, while Common Lisp lacks a standardized IDE, leading to developers using third-party tools like Emacs or SLIME for development.
Community and Support: Common Lisp has a mature and active community with a wider range of libraries and resources available, making it easier for developers to find solutions and support for their projects compared to Racket, which has a smaller community and fewer resources.
Concurrency: Racket's runtime system provides built-in support for lightweight concurrency, making it easier to write parallel programs, whereas Common Lisp requires external libraries such as Bordeaux Threads for implementing concurrent and parallel programming.

In Summary, the key differences between Common Lisp and Racket lie in their syntax, purpose, module systems, development environments, community support, and concurrency capabilities.

Common Lisp vs Racket

Overview