[phonebucket]

I'm eager to jump into a Lisp.

Janet seems really tempting for tiny footprint, distributability etc.

But I'm currently leaning towards to Racket just because it would be more or less compatible with a whole host of Scheme books that I'd like to read (The Little Schemer/Typer/Learner, SICP, Functional Differential Geometry).

Does anyone familiar with Janet know if those books can be easily worked through with Janet for a newbie Lisper?

[cardanome]

Racket is a great choice for learning but also very batteries included if you want to make real projects in it.

Janet has a more Clojure-inspired syntax but the semantics and general ideas should carry over. I think trying to work through the books in Janet would be a great extra challenge. You can always drop that and focus on Racket if it becomes it too much for you.

[netbioserror]

Why not try doing the exercises in Janet? It gives you the end-product goal so you don't have to waste energy on ideation, but having to figure out syntactic differences and compatible standard library functions and macros yourself really helps you understand a language top-to-bottom and is arguably the best way to learn. The way I learn languages all the time is to translate exercises on sites like HackerRank or exercism along with toy projects I already have.

[alwaysbeconsing]

I haven't used Janet but there were some notes in the author's ebook (https://janet.guide/) that suggested it had some small but key differences with a more "traditional" Lisp that might trip you up or at least cause friction. I'd suggest using Racket for those books.

[dgb23]

With a little bit of effort you can make it work. But I believe Racket has specific language definitions for some of these books so you can follow them more or less seamlessly.

[medo-bear]

dont overwhelm yourself. use the language the book was designed for

common lisp also has some really great books, beginner and advanced. paip is probably the most famous of these

[incanus77]

Are you familiar with Lua? How about Fennel?

[cellularmitosis]

because Janet is a lisp-1, this should be very doable.