When comparing Racket vs twinBASIC, the Slant community recommends twinBASIC for most people. In the question“What are the best general-purpose programming languages?” twinBASIC is ranked 12th while Racket is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose twinBASIC is:
Any code that runs in VB6 will run in twinBASIC (once v1 is released). Code that runs in VBA will also run in twinBASIC, though you need to account for any dependencies on the host application's object model (e.g., the Excel or Access Application object).
Specs
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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 100% Backward Compatible with VB6/VBA
Any code that runs in VB6 will run in twinBASIC (once v1 is released). Code that runs in VBA will also run in twinBASIC, though you need to account for any dependencies on the host application's object model (e.g., the Excel or Access Application object).
Pro No runtime requirement
The lack of a runtime dependency makes twinBASIC applications very lightweight and portable. Additionally, compiled executables only include necessary code from any referenced libraries. The classic "Hello, World" program compiles down to an 8 KB .exe with no external dependencies.
Pro Compile DLLs to extend VBA functionality
Can be used to extend VBA functionality by compiling standard and ActiveX DLLs in both 32 and 64bit.
Pro 64bit compilation is supported
64bit compilation is supported, as well as 32bit.
Pro At last! a replacement for VB6
At last there is a replacement for Microsoft VB6 - and for VBA too - twinBASIC programming.