> Racket, as a full-featured dialect of Lisp, has an aggressively simple syntax. For a small fraction of students, this syntax is an impediment. To be blunt, if these students have a fundamental mental barrier to accepting an alien syntactic regime even temporarily, they lack the mental dexterity to survive a career in computer science. Racket's powerful macro system and facilities for higher-order programming thoroughly erase the line between data and code. If taught correctly, Lisp liberates.
What a rude paragraph. I think this viewpoint is very unfortunate. I love functional programming, and I think everyone benefits from learning it, but this garbage attitude is toxic to students. The author cannot imagine a successful computer scientist who doesn't love the same PL paradigms as him. I would prefer to keep them away from my learners.