My next step on the road to lisp is at the International Lisp Conference in Cambridge, MA, this March.
A lot of people are surprised to hear I’m interested in Lisp, but I’ve been studying scheme informally for about 3 years, reading SICP, and finishing The Little Schemer last year. I’ve been interested in clojure for about 18 months, especially after seeing Rich Hickey talk about it last March. Now I’m studying it in earnest with Stu Halloway’s Programming Clojure.
I don’t use lisps of any sort at work, so it’s not a “practical” language to study like, say, C# is. But that’s short-term thinking. Learning lisp is plenty practical, if you’re looking longer-term — even if it’s only three years out. Learning lisp teaches you about some of the core issues of programming.
I like learning lisp because it’s a window into the workings of programming languages, being so close to the AST. I want to learn more about meta-programming with macros, hygienic or not.
And for the record, the functional techniques in The Little Schemer have improved my Ruby, JavaScript, and C# in some really solid ways. Functional programming is making its way to the rest of the programming world, and lisp does functional programming.
If you’ll be at the conference, I’d love to hear from you.
