flooey.org — A Closed and Common Lisp
I just recently finished up Advent of Code for 2021, and, like last year, I did it in a new-to-me language. This year’s choice was Common Lisp. My total previous exposure to Lisp was a couple weeks writing Scheme in my Programming Languages class at university, so it was almost entirely a novel experience.
Writing Lisp is like entering an alternate timeline where computing in the 1960s took a significantly different path. Rather than ALGOL becoming the favored language and spreading the syntax of blocks, assignment statements, function calls, and the rest to languages from C to JavaScript to Rust to Python, instead the world is based on lists, S-expressions, and parentheses (oh, the parentheses!).
It reminds me of nothing so much as my brief foray into learning Japanese. The vast majority of non-English natural language that I was exposed to growing up was from the Indo-European family (particularly the western European ones), so when I was first started learning Japanese, it was eye-opening. Almost every aspect of the language was unfamiliar, and it gave me a new appreciation for the great diversity of humanity.
Overall, I was greatly pleased with my choice of Common Lisp. It’s a very pleasant language to use, and it has some real high points. Below, I’ll discuss a few specific areas that caught my eye.
