I first got interested in Lisp through the writings of Paul Graham. If you’re not already familiar with his essays, I strongly recommend you click over and browse around. You’re not going to find that kind of quality here (not yet anyway). It’s hard to pick just one article, but I would probably start here (even though it’s not about Lisp directly).
Actually, my first “encounter” with Lisp was by way of the Computer Systems Engineering department head at the University of Arkansas some time around 1995-96, Dr. Ronald Skeith. In one of his classic tirades about the strengths of C and the flaws of Perl (or was it the other way around?), he said something like… “Of course, you could just throw the whole thing away and go write it in Lisp”. I don’t remember anything else about the context of the comment (or what it was that we were throwing away exactly), but the expression always stuck in my head. Mainly because the way he said it seemed to imply you would be stark raving mad, or stark raving genius, to consider writing anything in Lisp, and probably a little of both. In hindsight, I think he was trying in his (not so) subtle way to point us toward the path of true enlightenment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So I won’t go into all the details about how Lisp is the language that all modern languages are slowly evolving towards, or how Lisp is a language for writing other languages, or how Lisp gives you a competitive advantage over hackers using other languages, or how it is the One True Language, but I will share some of my thoughts in the coming weeks as I continue to learn more.
