Racket vs Pony

Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.

Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets)
Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up.

Includes several free online books and great documentation.

Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.

Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming.

Racket makes it inconvenient to pursue imperative habits while encouraging functional programming by Lisps's syntax. For example, the syntax for defining a function is almost the exact same as defining a variable. In addition, Racket has a strong set of higher-order functions built in to the language.

Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed.

The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free.

Because of its capabilities secure type system, provided you don't use the C FFI, references will never be stale, race conditions are effectively impossible, deadlocks don't happen because locks and mutexes are never needed, and processes never crash because all exceptions must be handled. (Barring compiler bugs or external memory corruption, of course.) Pony programs can still lock up due to infinite loops, like any Turing-complete language.

Compiles to native code, and features an intelligent garbage collector that takes advantage of the actor architecture to get essentially free garbage collection.

Calling low-level C functions is as simple as use "lib:clibrary" and @c_function_name[return_type](parameter:type). Linking C to Pony libraries is just as easy, as the Pony compiler will generate appropriate header files.