The Nature of Lisp (2006)

This was the page that made me finally grasp why Lisp and s-expressions are relevant. After reading this about a year ago, I ended up picking up a Clojure book and now I'm enamored with s-expressions. I feel late to the party. The last time I tried to learn Lisp (prior to reading this) was in like 2003/4 from some CLISP tutorial that scared me away from having nothing but math examples and zero explanation of the philosophy or design…

"Why on Earth would anyone want to use a language with such horrific syntax?!" What is it with statements like this? It just sounds like a 'meme' to me, that everyone hears (even from advocates like this one) at first that the 'syntax' (of which there is a lot less than most languages in a Lisp) is 'horrible'? Of course, we, the learn-ed of Lisp, say that after a while the 'parens just disappear', which they don't, but they sure…

For me, lisp macros can be a bit vexing, I prefer to not have too many unique, one of a kind, meta-abstractions cooked up by teammates on a big project. A good, widely adopted lisp macro can be handy, for example John Wiegley‘s use-package makes my Emacs configuration much cleaner. I’m not sure where the right boundary is. Decades ago I was quite enthusiastic about macro systems, but the experience of TeX programming made me realize that sometimes plain old…

Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs. Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual…