Alex Gian wrote on 08/23/2018 02:32 PM:
Racket is picking up a bucketload of good ideas from Clojure, not sure quite how much traffic is going the other way.
I'd figure it's probably pretty even, but I haven't thought of trying to keeping score. I'm sure the Racket community is influenced by Clojure, and Clojure is influenced by Racket, and both are influenced by others, and influence others.
Clojure is actually known for wisely learning from others. I recall the initial interest in Clojure was partly due to Lisp people being impressed that Rich Hickey, when he presented it, demonstrated a command of other languages, and they could see considered influences. (Also helping uptake was that STM was interesting. And Java support was seen as a way to increase "Lisp" jobs for CL people, since Java was crazy-popular around that time.)
The most curious possible Racket influences I've seen recently are small details scattered throughout Rust, which is a very different language to Racket, than Clojure is. (And, without getting into it right now, I have some vague ideas about a few things that the Racket and Rust communities might still want to look at in each other.)
Cross-pollination is good, and I think we want to embrace and encourage it, not think of it like a points system. Academia, for one environment, tends to encourage competitiveness and zero-sum in some ways (e.g., elite school admissions, professorships, citation indexes in some fields, tenure criteria), and when academia-rooted Racket is aware of and sometimes thoughtfully adapts ideas from elsewhere (but also keeps contributing novel ideas), I think that's a healthy sign.
If someone is picking what language to spend time with next... Were I doing a startup right now, knowing many languages, I would probably do much of the prototype/launch version in Racket. I'd also use Racket as a platform for many kinds of programming language research, as well as (for overlapping reasons) many hobby projects. Were I looking for a small set of languages to learn, to be a well-educated software developer, Racket would be among them (and perhaps the platform for covering a couple specific other language paradigms). Clojure is probably good for some of those purposes, too. Were I looking for a "30-day vocational re-training" language to learn, in hopes of getting a clerical job using that exact language, neither Racket nor Clojure would be anywhere near the top of the list. (But maybe you can help create so many clerical jobs that happen to use Racket, that we can complain about it being too mainstream, since we Racketeered when it was underground, man: "https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/";.)
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