I thought LISP died a long time ago?
Lisp isn't dead. Maybe it's not used in industry much anymore (at least Common Lisp), as many students only ever learn the semicolon languages (C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.) But there's still the occasional hacker who re-discovers the ancient arts of Lisp:
I think there's a lot of people who see Lisp and are immediately scared about the amount of parenthesis they see. Or they thought that Lisp was a functional programming language and was only for prestigious academics.
A half-decent text editor can manage the parenthesis for you, and let you focus on the problem at hand. The parenthesis start to fade away and what you are left with is an incredibly expressive syntax for which you can manipulate your program code just like lists in Lisp macros, and solve the problem at hand by molding the language to the problem, not necessarily being forced to use any specific paradigm. In Lisp, you can write in a functional paradigm, procedural paradigm, object-oriented paradigm, or even make your own paradigm by extending the syntax of the language ("language oriented programming"). It's really cool when you spend the majority of your time programming just thinking.
Nothing compares to Lisp when it comes to Artificial Intelligence too: manipulating equations is as easy as manipulating Lisp code in a symbolic manner. When you take this paradigm to a larger scale, you get an incredibly powerful and expressive language to construct your AI programs.
I usually like programming in Racket. Racket, in many ways, has the beauty of Scheme, the practicality of Python, and the hack-ability of Common Lisp. For example, you can extend the syntax of the language using either hygienic or unhygienic macros, you get access to a plethora of modern libraries, and you don't have all of the kludges of Common Lisp (like the hidden rplacd sitting in the dark corners of your code). But even programming in Common Lisp can be quite fun. When you see past the kludges of it's history and write it within a modern style, you end up with something quite hackable and fun. And better yet, there's
so many Common Lisp implementations that you can port your code to nearly any platform (for example, there's MCL for the Macintosh, and CLISP will even run in DOS and ancient versions of Windows).
I may just be reiterating the standard harping that
SmugLispWeenies usually say, but maybe I make my point about how cool Lisp can be as far as bringing modern code to old platforms goes. Regardless, maybe just try it for some project and see if you feel the same way about the language. If you don't come in with a bad attitude, turns out the language can be pretty fun to program in.
