Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Racket vs Lobster, the Slant community recommends Racket for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Racket is ranked 20th while Lobster is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Racket is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook
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.
Pro Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start
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.
Pro Free resources to Learn
Includes several free online books and great documentation.
Pro Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket
Pro Active community
Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.
Pro Syntax fits to functional programming
Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming.
Pro Subtly encourages 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.
Pro Easily embeddable
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.
Pro Compile time reference counting
Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer.
Pro Python-esque syntax
There's an audience who loves that.
Pro WebAssembly backend
More options for users.
Pro Inline structs
Structs are allocated in their parent, and come at zero overhead.
Pro Automatic memory management
Better than Rust. No sadism.
Pro Type inference algorithm
Just works. Goes further than most languages in terms of allowing code without types.
Cons
Con Small community
Lead doesn't appear to be so ambitious or has a vision to push making more popular.
Con Compile time reference counting not 100%
Around 5% of time, need to escape to runtime reference counting. Working to get the percentage as low as possible.
Con Lobster not yet totally written in Lobster
Core written in C++. Plans to change that, but has been a long time.
Con Python-like syntax, but different use case and domain
Not Python compatible and often significantly different in purpose and use cases.
