Beautiful Racket

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1. vermilinguaAug 2026
   Another awesome Racket resource: https://beautifulracket.com/
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2. skrishnamurthiSep 2025
   These are great questions!

   Yes, what you're describing is the "extreme" version of LOP. Of course you don't have to do it that aggressively to get working code.

   Two references I like to point to:

   https://www.hashcollision.org/brainfudge/

   https://beautifulracket.com/

   They will give you a sense of how one uses LOP productively.

   You do not need to write a "web server language"! To the contrary, the Web server provides several languages to give you a trade-off between ease and power in writing server-side Web applications. So you can just write regular Racket code and serve it through the server. The server also comes with some really neat, powerful primitives (orthogonal to LOP) — like `send/suspend` — that make it much easier to write server-based code.

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3. bunderbunderJul 2024
   The book Beautiful Racket is the best defense of macros out there, on "show, don't tell" grounds. Also, it's just so well-written and describes such an interesting set of tools that I'd argue it's worth a skim even if you don't intend to learn the language.

   https://beautifulracket.com/

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4. uncleshelbyMay 2024
   Matthew Butterick wrote a book about Racket (a dialect of Lisp) which has a great appendix that tries to explain why Lisp is worth learning:

   https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.htm...

   There are lots of evangelist explanations for why Lisp is The Best out there, but this is one of the better and more concrete ones.

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5. dan-gApr 2023
   Related: Matthew Butterick has a very accessible online book called Beautiful Racket on how to create little languages using Racket to solve problems (including some Advent of Code) which I found a really fun read:

   https://beautifulracket.com/

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6. disconcisionMar 2023
   fantastic list! although obviously no such plan can really cover the whole space, i cant help but want to suggest adding some languages representation to the list; a simple interpreter or compiler project, or alternatively some symbolic computation eg algebra or differential calculus. being exposed to this stuff via Racket was hugely transformative for me (e.g. https://beautifulracket.com/stacker/why-make-languages.html), but if lisps arent your thing theres plenty of great projects in e.g. java as well: https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html
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