Thanks for recommending that essay. Reading through it I found myself first agreeing, every other attempt sings about Lisp's wonders without showing you the what/why/how, only woo. Then, here I was halfway through this essay also not yet knowing what the fuzz is about, and when the author finally gets around to it I end up not really sold on it. I have given Racket and CL my time before only to end giving up, not having found "enlightenment" or even the motivation to keep at it. Another day, with more free time I expect I'll give Beautiful Racket also a try.
So glad to see him articulate what I've always felt about x-exprs.
It often gets overlooked because we all understandably want to hype something in a language that's really cool, original, abstract or otherwise reflects well on us. But being able to intuitively, iteratively and rapidly work on XML & HTML files is lush, and the IDE with built-in REPL is just gravy for this purpose.
Even if working on XML and HTML files is boring and a technically solved problem in most languages, it feels better in Racket to me, and the essay did explain why it feels better.
