I bought a book on Common Lisp this week. I couldn't help but feel strangely attracted to it. The urge to start learning lisp grew incredibly strong over the last year, and finally I succumbed :). Maybe it's an age thing, an experience thing. You have to have had a certain walk of life before you get to it. I'm not planning on doing anything useful with it (yet), but it just feels like I could not consider myself to be a 'complete' programmer until I learned lisp.

The reason, I guess, is that my personal evolution is indeed very similar to many other people's tales of their evolution in programming. Starting off procedural, low level, (pascal, C) and then growing into object orientation, mastering what polymorphism has to offer (C++, Java), and moving on to loving python. Python seriously wetted my appetite for solving problems with a more functional approach. List comprehensions were truly liberating for me. Python made me a much better C++ programmer. But also very much a frustrated C++ programmer.

So now there's lisp. People say lots of things about lisp. Things that drew my attention. "Learning lisp made me a better programmer in any language". Hmmm. Familiar. "The programmable programming language". Interesting. I continuously tend to go more "meta".

The only thing that worries me now is that the author seems to have more of a background in perl, rather than python.

Bruce Eckel has some interesting notes on PyCon 2007. Particularly the bits about crunchy, and IronPython getting around the global interpreter lock. But there's more.