Top Ten Reasons to Learn Racket!

It’s like Latin: it gives you insight into other languages derived
from racket, like Latin helps you understand French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Romanian, and English.

It’s like Latin: you can understand otherwise obscure references,
e.g., some Yale students graduate cum laude, some graduate magna cum
laude, and some graduate mirabile dictu.  (attributed to William
Howard Taft, Yale class of 1878)

Three reasons: recursion, recursion, recursion.

Unlike other high level languages, racket reflects the principles of
the von Neumann computer architecture in which data and instructions
are syntactically identical.  (We will see this when we write assembly
language programs for TC-201.)

The uniform syntax of data and code in racket makes it easy to extend
racket to create new programming languages. (link to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_features#Language_Extensions

The uniform syntax of data and code in racket makes it convenient to
write programs that can reflect on other programs, which is an
appealing notion in artificial intelligence.  You can write programs
that think about thinking!

It looks good on your resume, as a second order effect.  Most
employers are not looking for people who code in racket, but those who
themselves learned racket will appreciate the intellectual challenges
you faced and will likely value you more, creating a better work
experience.  (Story about Francesca and Google.)

Learning to program is not like learning a foreign language.  It is
like learning to drive.  It really does not matter that much what kind
of car you use to learn to drive.  All cars do basically the same
thing.  At some point in the future, you may land at an airport and
rent a car that you have never before driven.  However, within a few
minutes you will be happily on your way.  You need to think of
programming languages that way.  They all do basically the same thing.
You are learning how to steer, accelerate, put on the brakes, and
operate the turn signals, windshield washer, and air conditioner.
When I was student in the equivalent of CS 201, we learned ALGOL and
APL.

(Francesca:) We learn C because understanding how the computer manages
memory is a fundamental part of CS. In C you can't avoid understanding
if things are allocated on the heap or the stack, if you pass things
by pointer or by reference. Yes there are languages that let you avoid
that, but it's important to have a fundamental understanding of what
the language you're using is hiding so you know how to use it well.

Similarly understanding how data structures work by building them by
hand is important so that you understand the fundamentals of the
performance tradeoffs between them.

In racket you're learning the fundamentals of recursion, and recursive
data structures. Everything in racket is functions, and data
structures that are defined in terms of themselves. eg linked lists,
and trees. Recursively defined data structures and recursion more
generally is fundamental to computer science.

Lambda, baby, lambda!  Upon completing CS 201, you will be a member of
the Order of Lambda!.