When comparing Racket vs Light Table, the Slant community recommends Racket for most people. In the question“What are the languages that have most powerful and easy to use free IDEs?” Racket is ranked 8th while Light Table is ranked 10th. 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
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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 Inline evaluation
With LT's inline evaluation, you don't have to re-compile your whole source file. Each time you want to see an output, all you have to do is hover your cursor over the line you'd like to evaluate and press ctrl+enter
; LT will evaluate that line of code for you.
Pro Your code runs live as you write it
The "Watches" feature lets you see your code running live as you type it. This means that you can debug your code live while writing it, which leads to considerably less programming errors.
Pro Plugin manager available
LT has a plugin manager built directly inside of it. This plugin manager connects to LT's own registry of plugins, so whenever you want assistance while writing your HTML, JS, or even Python, just open up the plugin manager, search for it, and click the little install button beside it's name. Your plugin will then be installed.
Cons
