Racket Sucks, Don’t Try It

I’ve done a lot of programming in Racket. A lot. And people often ask me: “What do you think of Racket? Should I try it?”

The answer is simple: No. No, you should not.

You’re the kind of person who would do very badly with Racket. Here’s why:

• All those parentheses! Good Lord, the language is swimming in parentheses. It’s not uncommon for a line to end with ten or twelve parentheses.

• Almost no mutation! Idiomatic Racket code doesn’t set the values of variables in loops, and it doesn’t set the values of result variables in if branches, and you can’t declare variables without giving them values, and Racket programmers hardly ever use classes with mutable fields. There’s no return at all. It’s totally not like Java or C. It’s very strange and unsettling.

• Library support. Yes, there are lots of libraries available for Racket, but there are many more in, say, Python. I think there are currently fifty-five thousand packages available for Python.

• Racket is an experimental language: when the Racket team decides that the language should change, it does. Typed Racket is evolving rapidly, and even core Racket is getting fixes and new functionality every day.

• Racket is not a popular language. You’re not going to be able to search for code snippets on line with anything like the success rate that you’d have for JavaScript or Python or Java.

• Racket will ruin you for life as a Java developer. You will be agonizingly aware of how much boilerplate you’re cranking out, and after every hour of shoveling Java, you will sneak off to the bathroom and write a tiny beautiful macro that no one will ever be allowed to see or use.

If none of these succeed in scaring you off, well, then, go ahead and give it a try. Just remember: I warned you.