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I'm getting started with functional programming, which language would you recommend?
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Clojure has it's own set of idioms; it comes with some small surprises for old lisp hands. There are some things it's really brought into the mainstream: performant persistent data structures in particular.
As well as excellent tooling and pedagogy, the principle attraction of Racket is the macro system. There's a great book about this (this is true of just about all aspects of Racket). Racket's focus is on building a tower of languages via macro extension. Metaprogramming is thematically FP-adjacent but neither sufficient or necessary; but if you're looking for a fun learning experience it's really worth a look.
In terms of employment opportunities - I know of several Clojure shops (on the JVM it has the bonus of being able to take advantage of the hole ecosystem), but I'm not aware of anywhere that's using Racket outside of the academic sphere.