[continued from previous message]   
      
   to write than in Racket.  They're simpler.  They may have less academic   
   elegance or whatever, but it has the awesome beauty of being extremely   
   simple and practical and getting the job done and being perfect in the   
   practical sense.  Also, Common Lisp has all of its years with a lot of   
   smart people having perfected the tools (and they're still doing it).   
   As a result, you have awesome compilers such as SBCL.  It produces fast   
   native code, which is a pleasure to see running.  Racket, on the other   
   hand, doesn't have the same amount of years for optimization, say.   
      
   I think another thing about Common Lisp is that I developed a confidence   
   that what I do at the REPL will work exactly the same at run time, when   
   loaded by the OS directly.  In other words, there's a sense of control   
   that I get with Common Lisp that I never got with Racket.   
      
   So Donald Norman nailed it.   
      
   Another point I can make, which other people have made in comp.lang.lisp   
   before is that Racket adds a thick layer on top of POSIX.  I studied the   
   POSIX interface, so when I use a language that doesn't let me guide   
   myself by way of the POSIX interface, I'm already at a loss.  For   
   instance, you'll find no select(2) call in Racket because it's /likely/   
   buried in their completely different interface called events.  But then   
   I don't know if they're using select(2) or poll(2) or what.  I would   
   expect them considering this an advantage.  Of course, Common Lisp has   
   nothing to do with select(2), but you can the calls you need in the UNIX   
   packages of your compiler.  I couldn't find such things in Racket.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)