Some time ago I listened to a Chaos Radio Express podcast dealing with Dylan.

Dylan is a pretty nice language developed by a research group leaded by Apple Computers. The idea was to create a better lisp language. One of the biggest changes was a switch from the S-Format syntax that marks lisp to an Algol like syntax most of you know from C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and so on.

After hearing that podcast I had to try it but did not come far somehow.

I also told a friend of mine that I was checking out Dylan and he told me that I should try lisp. I did not care at that moment. Last friday I was curious and asked him to give me pointers about Lisp. I got a pretty big list where I should look and what I should get. The best pointer was Practical Common Lisp.

Practical Common Lisp is a book that is available free in the internet (you can also buy it as treeware). I installed sbcl and slime(do not wonder if the link to slime is not working, at the moment I am writing this the guys of common-lisp.net have some problems with their dns, but you can still reach the site using the ip 80.68.86.115 on my shiny new MacBookPro 17″ and started reading.

I tell you that book is amazing and lisp even more.

I can only encourage you to try it. REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop) is the best thing ever. The integrated debugger interface, REPL and slime mode for emacs provided by the Slime package is beautiful!

It is really difficult to describe why. It just feels right and is mighty. Take a look by yourself and you will be shocked why Java, Perl or even Ruby are used so much. Lisp just rules and not only for scientific stuff.

I will write try to write something more in depth later.