#lang at-exp racket
    (require racket/date)
    (define s string-append)
    (displayln @s{Current date&time: @(date->string (current-date) #t)})

Also, I once got the snow yellow at over 3 meters.

* Lisp made the first giant step of having code representable as data for meta-programming, and chose sexprs to do so

* Common Lisp came later, and made the important step of requiring this representation, which means that in every CL implementation you're required to have the code as data aspect

* But the flip side of this is that CL hard-wires just sexprs, it forbids an extended type, which means that you can't get anything more than sexprs (without resorting to "extra properties" hash table tricks)

* Meanwhile, Scheme (R5 and others that have only `syntax-rules') took a step back by specifying only rewrite rules which can be implemented in any way an implementation chooses

* But some Scheme implementations did use sexprs, but since they need to encode more information (lexical context) they extended them into syntax values (note that some Scheme low-level macro systems try to present users with a simplified interface where user code sees just the sexprs)

* Later on, Racket took further steps and enriched its syntax values with "more stuff"

* R6RS got closer to this too, by adopting the syntax-case system (but some people had issues with "wrapping" symbols, since you can't do that with the hash table trick)

* And finally, R7RS (the "small" version) is going to take a step back into the R5RS days. (And in the "big" language it looks like they'll adopt one of these systems that try to keep the sexpr illusion.)

In Racket, OTOH, there are definitely syntax objects with enough functionality to write code that handles them, and I suspect that you know that. The question is whether this should be considered "homoiconic" or not, but this is a kind of a subjective issue, since at an extreme, I can say that all languages that have strings are homoiconic. Perhaps you need more from the language to make it so, maybe eval, or maybe actually require it to have compile-time procedural macros? In any case, Racket will have all of the features that CL does, so it is arguably at least "as homoiconic" as CL is. But in fact, it has more than just s-expressions: these syntax objects are basically sexprs + a bunch of stuff like source location and lexical context, so in fact they represent more than what lists in CL do. Should I then conclude that Racket is more homoiconic than CL? And this is not a tongue-in-cheek argument: in fact, many CL implementations are aware of the limits of sexprs as good representation for code, and add things like source location via a backdoor, like a hash table that maps pair objects to additional properties. Racket does that in its basic syntax representation so IMO it's fine to indeed consider it more homoiconic. And I also say that for the addition of lexical context information -- that's something that is not only included in the Racket syntax object, it's something that you just cannot get in CL, so if homoiconicity is being able to have a high-level representation of code (unlike raw strings), then this is another point where Racket wins the pissing context.

Finally, it's not that all "many Schemes" are limited as described above -- there are many of them that have their own macro systems with similar syntax values, and that includes Schemes that follow R6RS since that dictates syntax-case which comes with them. It just happens that Racket is has been traditionally running at the front lines, so it's more advanced.

In fact, if you want to focus on macros as some kind of a driving force for code -- then it that exact aspect (a) macros in Racket can be very different than macros in other Lisps; (b) more than that, there are many kinds of macros in Racket that you cannot write in those Lisps. As for digging on-line for crossover code from other Lisps that finds its way into Racket: you'll obviously find a lot of Scheme code, but practically nothing from other Lisps. The bottom line is that the syntactic "lots of parens" similarity is an extremely shallow one.

Bottom line: Racket is roughly at the same level of a "functional programming language" as ML etc, certainly more than Python and Ruby where side-effects are embraced much quicker. Like you said, "even have equivalents of map..." -- whereas in Racket these kind of functional/non-destructive operations are expected. (For example, the Racket GC is tuned to perform well when allocating lots of short-term objects, something that is a direct result of FP being the most dominant style.)

And yes, I know that you're not bashing Lisp -- you're just quick to lump all Lisps on the same pile, and reach the obviously bogus conclusion that first-class syntax is the thing that drives code. (That's a point that is subjectively obvious to me, as someone who has been in this part of the PL world for more than two decades.) "LISP" is, BTW, just an outdated spelling, period. It's true that in CL circles "Lisp" is taken as implicitly meaning "Common Lisp", but in the same circles "LISP" is taken implicitly as "an outdated spelling for Lisp, therefore Common Lisp" unless you're one of the old farts whose making a reference to LISP 1.5 or something as ancient.

Another point: yes, Racket programmers know and use tail-calls, but that has nothing to do with "the looping constructs provided in the library" since those are implemented in terms of the same facility. The existence of these loops is therefore not making the language any less functional than the fact that you can implement a while loop in Haskell. The bottom line is that Racket is as functional a language as the interpretation of the term was before Haskell kidnapped it and turned it into some religious point.

(BTW, if you want to bash lisps, do yourself a favor and drop the all-caps "LISP" -- it immediately demonstrates the kind of limited knowledge you have on it.)

(I can imagine an interface that is transparent at the arc level, where are strings are just passed to the backend and retrieved from it, and the backend converts them to and from byte strings. Later on it could change to use a FS or a DB or whatever.)