Available as free and open-source software under a GNU Lesser Public License, Racket was developed by PLT in the mid-1990s.
Based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp, Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language designed for programming language design and implementation.
By the early 1970s, Smalltalk and Simula were out, suggesting the values of an object-oriented way of programming. Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman formed Scheme at the MIT AI Lab, as one of the three main dialects of Lisp in 1975, extending Lisp with assignment statements and jumps in control flow.
While at Rice University, Matthias Felleisen, along with Robby Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi wanted to use Scheme to teach math to children in a creative way. Their idea was that middle school and high school students would write computer games in plain arithmetic and algebra, which were easily expressed in a Scheme-like language. When they found that Scheme was too limited to do everything they wanted, they added structures, a class system, exceptions, fancy loops, modules, custodians, eventspace, libraries for building graphical-user interfaces, and other features.
Determining that their new flavor of Scheme was different enough from the parent language to benefit from its own development, Felleisen founded PLT in the mid-1990s. Together, the team, that included Findler, Flatt, Krishnamurthi, and others, produced DrScheme, a programming environment for novice Scheme programmers, naming the main language that DrScheme supported PLT Scheme, which was released in 1995.
The team began conducting workshops for high school teachers, training them in program design and functional programming, and the feedback from these efforts led to further development of the language. Over the years, the PLT team added teaching languages, an algebraic stepper, a transparent read-eval-print loop, and other innovations to DrScheme.
In 2010, PLT Scheme was renamed Racket, coinciding with the release of Version 5.0. Subsequently, DrScheme was renamed DrRacket, and is available for Linux, macOS, Unix, and Windows, and programs behave similarly on each of these platforms.
The focus of this guide, obviously, is the Racket programming language, as well as any IDEs, editors, or other tools designed to facilitate programming in Racket. Tutorials, guides, user groups, and forums, where Racket is the chief topic, are also appropriate for this category.
Recommended Resources
Beautiful Racket: An Introduction to Language-Oriented Programming Using Racket
Written by Matthew Butterick, the introduction and guide to programming with Racket is presented online in its entirety. Although no PDF, paperback, or password will be delivered after purchase, it is not being offered as a free book. The book has no ads and is supported by its readers. Suggested payment levels are posted, with information on how and why readers should pay for the book. It is divided into a foreword, introduction, setup, tutorials, explainers, and an appendix.
https://beautifulracket.com/
Prepared by Robert R. Snapp, and hosted by the University of Vermont, the page presents a guide to programming in Racket, offering programming exercises developed using DrRacket, which supports the Racket programming language, a descendant of Scheme and Lisp. The source codes to several example programs are posted, all written in Racket, and links to online documentation about both Racket and Scheme are included, along with books and download links.
http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~rsnapp/puzzles/racket.html
PLT Redex is a domain-specific language designed for specifying and debugging operational semantics and is embedded in the Racket programming language, making all of the conveniences of the modern programming language available, including standard libraries, as well as non-standard ones, and a program development environment. The book, Semantics Engineering with PLT Redex (SEwPR) by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Findler, and Matthew Flatt, is discussed here.
https://redex.racket-lang.org/
Racket is a general-purpose programming language and the first ecosystem for language-oriented programming. The most recent version and its packages may be freely downloaded, along with its source code, bug reports, and nightly snapshot builds. Available documentation includes a quick introduction, a guide to the language, web applications, systems programming, a reference document, or all documentation in one package. Development and community news are included.
https://racket-lang.org/
Jesse Alama suggests to those who are considering learning to program using Racket that they take a short, structured excursion into the programming language, and offers the structure. Racket Weekend is a short course on the language, intended to be completed in two days, available in three editions. In the Couch Edition, a basic 100-page PDF ebook is free of charge, but the Library Edition includes the Couch Edition plus 45 exercises, and the Classroom Edition adds 2 hours of screencasts.
https://racketweekend.com/
Inspired by Conrad Barski’s “Land of Lisp,” “Realm of Racket” follows a young man by the name of Chad as he searches for the meaning of life and programming. He finds it in Racket, the most unique programming language in the world. Available in print and eBook, a sample chapter may be viewed online, as well as links to where the book can be purchased, promotional videos, games, wallpapers, and news about the book. Errors are noted in the errata page.
http://www.realmofracket.com/
The annual event is a time to learn new developments and applications for the Racket programming language, as well as to share what you know and have learned. Registration times, event location, online registration, professionalism policy information, partnerships, sponsors and sponsorship opportunities are identified, as well as a schedule of talks, workshops, learning and networking opportunities, and other events are published to the site, along with registration fees.
https://racketfest.com/
