Despite its vague title, this article is actually a gentle presentation of the ideas behind the Racket language and ecosystem.

Racket, started in 1995, is a descendant of various Lisps, particularly Scheme, with a strong emphasis on functional programming.

This article presents Racket’s ideas for “language-oriented programming”--that is, using Racket to develop extensible embedded languages.

The ideas are sound, and the presentation is well written. The audience is not Racket experts; they will find nothing new here, nor will outsiders find any deep technical details. This article is not timely either: most of the ideas have been in Racket for years, and some have been floating around various Lisp communities for even longer.

This article may be useful for attracting newcomers to this delightful world. While it is not clear why CACM chose to publish it in 2018, it is good to see articles like this appear every few years.