Aaron Feng

For the past few weeks I have been playing around with Lisp during pretty much all my free time. Yes, Lisp. This is not my first encounter with Lisp. I played around with Lisp when I was in college, and I hated every moment of it. Functional languages have always been foreign to me, and I tried to stay far away from that path. I'm at the point in my career I can no longer ignore the existence of functional languages.

Last year I decided to learn Erlang since it received a lot of buzz in the community. Shortly after learning the basics, I lost interest. Even though I no longer keep up with Erlang on a regular basis, it has eased me into the realm of functional languages.

Back in 2004, I read Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. The chapter entitled "Beating the average" has stuck in my mind since I first read it. In this chapter, Graham described how he was able to overtake the big corporations during the internet boom using an unconventional programming language: Lisp. I decided to give the chapter another read to refresh my mind. After reading it again, I was inspiredto give Lisp another try. To setup my Lisp environment, I installed emacs, slime, and sbcl on my macbook.

After going through a few online Common Lisp tutorials, I just couldn't get enough of it. The more I learned about it, the deeper I wanted to understand.Eventually I stumbled on to Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel. The book is very well written and easy to read. By the nature of the language, Lisp tends to be more theoretical. Seibel connected the theoretical with the practical which made the book relevent and enjoyable. Best of all, the whole book is freely available online. Even if you have no desire to learn Lisp, just read the first 3 chapters (they are very short). Who knows, you might just continue to read the whole thing.