I can relate to being frustrated with the lack of "real" io-examples when learning lisp, while at the same time seeing the benefits of functional programming, macros etc.
With something like clojure, you at least have a pretty clear deployment story (make a jar, drop jar in a container) -- but it's still not clear how you would best go about writing something like berklydb in clojure - never mind in SBCL (come to think of it, even implementing a couple of text handling utilities like grep or cat is pretty hard to wrap your mind around when working with "old school" lisps).
All that said, I'm pretty excited about racket, and somewhat hopeful that I'll eventually get around to doing some "real" functional programming in the not too distant future.
With something like clojure, you at least have a pretty clear deployment story (make a jar, drop jar in a container) -- but it's still not clear how you would best go about writing something like berklydb in clojure - never mind in SBCL (come to think of it, even implementing a couple of text handling utilities like grep or cat is pretty hard to wrap your mind around when working with "old school" lisps).
All that said, I'm pretty excited about racket, and somewhat hopeful that I'll eventually get around to doing some "real" functional programming in the not too distant future.