As someone who finds LISP and its various flavors very attractive and wants to learn more, as I slowly expand my Emacs init.el, I'd like to know what was <i>your</i> story and journey with LISP. How did you came across it first? By a piece of code, or a book that you were recommended by a friend/teacher? This will also be a source of motivation for me, thank you!
I first came across lisp in the 80s, when I briefly worked in AI.<p>Lisp taught me (this is the motivational bit for you) the power of a few well thought out orthogonal abstractions. Almost all other languages seem to me to be a mixture of leaky, non-orthogonal abstractions.<p>I've always loved lisp, but since I discovered Smalltalk and Self and Io (a few years later) I've loved those languages even more than Lisp.<p>So I've found it hard to go back to Lisp.<p>But actually Lisp is much better than my favourite languages, because there are no implementations of my favourite languages that are really well tied into the unix ecosystem (and the ones that come closest are hobby projects that are full of compiler bugs). So if a paternalistic god would like to tie me down and force me to go back to Lisp, that would probably be a good thing. I would definitely choose Scheme - possibly guile for the minimalism and because Andy Wingo's blog makes my head spin, but probably Racket.
My first exposure to Lisp was via Autolisp in the 80s (on a Tandy 2000!).<p>When I started getting into Linux and stuff in the mid-90s, I noticed how many programs used some form of Lisp as an extension language -- Emacs, GIMP, Abuse (video game)... Then I stumbled across Guile, the GNU Project's pick for such an extension language in future programs, and tried it out. It felt much more comfortable than Perl for various system tasks. I liked composing a program bit by bit, testing the pieces out in the REPL, which was harder to do with other languages, even Perl.<p>I've been <i>real into</i> Lisp (esp. Scheme) since then.
I recommend the lectures of "MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation" :
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090</a><p>it's not strictly about lisp but it's an eye opener to the power of the language
my story was clojure. came for the immutable data structures, stayed for reagent.<p>you should learn clojurescript and reagent! it’s very good.<p>lots of good clojure books to read too.