GoKawiilA Friendly Introduction to Racket
11 Aug, 2026
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it." — Eric S. Raymond
Welcome. Today you'll learn a language from one of programming's oldest and most unusual families. A language where code is data, where parentheses are pure structure, and where programs can write programs. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have written your own syntax.
A bit of history
Lisp was born in 1958, invented by John McCarthy at MIT. For context: it's the second-oldest high-level language still in use (only Fortran, from 1957, beats it by a year). Python arrived in 1991. JavaScript in 1995. Lisp predates them by more than 30 years and several ideas we now consider "modern" were born there:
Garbage collection — invented for Lisp.
— invented for Lisp. First-class functions — passing functions as arguments, now standard everywhere.
— passing functions as arguments, now standard everywhere. The REPL — the interactive read-eval-print loop that Python, Node, and Julia all have today started in Lisp.
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