I became interested in Lisp a couple of years ago after going through far too much pain with a relatively simple genetic programming exercise I wrote in C++. Since I didn't have direct access to the AST, I was mutating a string that I passed into a simple interpreter I had to write. When everything was done, I thought about how bad a choice it was to use C++ for this sort of problem because performance just wasn't as important as I thought.<p>I became interested in Clojure soon after that because I listened to a Rich Hickey talk where he described how languages are built on platforms in a way they weren't 20 years ago (you'd run directly on the OS and only have access to the libraries you wrote or linked in). Since I knew Java, the JVM and the libraries that come with it, I thought Clojure made the most logical choice if I was going to learn a Lisp.<p>I've been toying with it off and on since, and although I can't compare it to other Lisps, I can say that I think it's definitely a superior programming language to any other language I've worked with. Syntax annoys the hell out of me now.