A Friendly Introduction to Racket

Racket is a modern descendant of Lisp, one of programming's oldest languages (born 1958), which pioneered concepts like garbage collection, first-class functions, and the REPL that are now standard in contemporary programming languages. Originally designed for education and language research, Racket has evolved into a platform for "language-oriented programming," allowing developers to build domain-specific languages. Despite Lisp's decline after the "AI winter," variants like Clojure, Common Lisp, and Emacs Lisp remain actively used in production systems at major companies and financial institutions.