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.

It’s been 12 days since I last posted. My plan was to post once a day for the next month, so I’ve obviously fallen off the wagon a bit. In retrospect though I don’t feel bad because I’ve made good progress on several other projects I’m working on.

• ANSI Common Lisp — I’ve been reading and working my way through this book. I’ll save my thoughts about Lisp for a separate post. I do like the style of this book though. It reminds me a little of the famous K&R C book in that it’s sparse yet efficient. I’ll post some more thoughts about the book too once I’ve finished.

• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide — I got this book just about a week ago and I’ve already read through both the core and web specific sections (not including the reference material), which is something like 500 pages I think. It’s funny, but I never imagined I would get so excited over JavaScript. I can’t believe that I’ve gone this long as a web developer without really knowing the underlying language. Again, I’ll have to save my revelations for another post, but I would highly recommend this book to anybody who deals with JavaScript, and especially for anybody doing any serious (Dynamic HTML/AJAX) programming in JS.

• Introduction to Algorithms — I’m going back to school. I owned this book as an undergrad, and now I own it again. This is a meaty one… I’m just getting started, so it’s going to take a little bit.

• bonesisalive.com — I’ve started work on the comments feature. I was about half-way through adding support for Akismet to block spam comments, when I realized it was really a bit of premature optimization considering I don’t even have any readers at this point. I know full well I’ll have to implement it at some point, but I think it’s much better to just get the feature out. Especially because once I get the feature out I’ll feel better about publishing the link to this blog around. It feels kinda silly to have a sight that no one can comment on at the moment.