It Begins

The road that lead me to Common Lisp began with me searching for a programming language that would allow me to improve my programming skills. First, I ran into David N. Welton’s blog while researching. After reading a lot of information on his web site and blog, I thought it might be a good idea to ask him what he thought about my programming language search. He was nice enough to reply and recommend some languages. He mentioned Scheme, Forth, Haskell, Ruby, Tcl and Python. After considering and playing with Tcl and Ruby, I kept reading about many different languages. While reading, I kept running into people mentioning Lisp. For example, “This language has features of Lisp.”, “I wish this language was more like Lisp.”, “Lisp has so much more power than this.”. After seeing Lisp so many times, I thought “Hmm…I want to check out this Lisp language, it must be awesome!”. I have been into computers since the Commodore 64 back in the 80s. So I’ve heard Lisp mentioned before, but not enough to make me want to read more about it. In the 80s I remember languages like ADA, Fortran and Pascal.

I started reading everything I could about Lisp. My first realization was finding out the present day popular Lisp was now named Common Lisp. Then I realized Scheme was a Lisp type language. A light bulb appeared above my head, “Wait, David mentioned Scheme.”. I compared the two languages as much as I could. I decided on Common Lisp because I wanted to learn the language that closely descended from the original Lisp. Plus, one of the largest arguments I heard between Scheme and Common Lisp was that Common Lisp was much larger and it may be more difficult to learn. This really didn’t scare me, so I decided on Common Lisp.

So here I am starting this blog about Common Lisp after many months of sticking with the language. Keep in mind I am still in an early state of learning because my coding time is very limited. I have a full time job and other projects I’m involved in, plus my family keeps me very busy.