My personal, subjective, feeling is that the Racket offers an easier entry path (docs, libraries and library discovery, relative non-cruftiness, package management via raco, IDE, etc.). I also like that Racket is a little more biased toward FP than CL. I'm told the macro system is ahead of CL's, though I can't say I deeply grok macros.
The Racket community always feels friendly and welcoming to beginners, which is something the CL community hasn't always been.
I do like that CL has a standard with multiple implementations. That said, the standard feels old, and you can quickly run into libraries that were built with less-than-universal compatibility. Things like tail recursion in CL exist commonly in implementations, but not in the spec.
I've tried to carve out a bit of hobby time for lisps over the past few years. I started with CL and fought with the tooling and I could see the power, but I never felt great about my abilities with it. I tried Clojure and periodically use it as a stand-in for Java, and in that sense it is good. But these days, I've been playing in Racket, and it feels like the lisp I wish I'd started with.
One other item: the "enlightenment factor"—I'm really far from enlightenment, but I can see the crazy stuff people are doing in Racket with related, compatible languages, like Typed Racket and have a deep suspicion that Racket might carry me further on the path of enlightenment. That's down-the-road stuff for me though. Right now I'm enjoying small-time Racketeering.
The Racket community always feels friendly and welcoming to beginners, which is something the CL community hasn't always been.
I do like that CL has a standard with multiple implementations. That said, the standard feels old, and you can quickly run into libraries that were built with less-than-universal compatibility. Things like tail recursion in CL exist commonly in implementations, but not in the spec.
I've tried to carve out a bit of hobby time for lisps over the past few years. I started with CL and fought with the tooling and I could see the power, but I never felt great about my abilities with it. I tried Clojure and periodically use it as a stand-in for Java, and in that sense it is good. But these days, I've been playing in Racket, and it feels like the lisp I wish I'd started with.