I want to learn a functional programming language from the Lisp dialect but I'm not sure which one to pick. I want to be able to do practical things with it so I was thinking about Clojure. Does /prog/ have any suggestions?
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Anonymous2011-09-06 23:02
Clojure is more complicated than Scheme, stemming from both its design goals, with a more complex syntax which often saves keystrokes, but which can sometimes confuse you, and some compromises that it made to run on the JVM, like its lack of proper TCO. Also, the stack traces are shit.
On the other hand, you get a crap load of Java libraries besides Clojure ones, but those are often an eyesore when used within Clojure code, even though it's common to find wrappers. Also, Emacs support is very good and there are plugins for other IDEs as well.
I'll let someone else comment on Racket, I can only say that the base libraries are pretty large, but the IDE is rather poor save for the debugger and I don't know about the third party packages (I know that fluxus is suffering from the constant changes in Racket).