I cannot lisp.

As confessions go, it's a pretty weak one, but maybe I should explain myself.

For years now, I have been a fan of lisp, and advocating for its usage. I have used emacs daily for a decade and a half. I have several projects on my github which are lisp oriented in one way or another. I have written three minimalist lisp interpreters, and hacked around with two existing lisp projects.

Sure, I know how to do the basics, I can do a basic Hello World in a handful of dialects without looking up syntax, and can comfortably write more complex functionality in them if I have some reference. I still feel like I don't really get it though. Which is a very strange thing to say, considering I advocate for its usage.

There are a lot of the core features and the ideas around which lisp is designed which I approve of, and more that I want to explore more. My problem is that in my day job, I am a C/C++ developer. I have tried to find uses for lisps in my projects, but I have never found anything where I can realistically use it in anger to actually get comfortable with it. When I've tried on some projects, I've always been stumbling at the "I know how to write this in C, and could write it much quicker." I can see the elegance of lisp, especially compared to a language like C, I just don't get it yet.

And I think that is the biggest problem. Programming in lisp needs such a different way of thinking about it than programming in a C-like language, whether this is a procedural language, or an object oriented one, that it is difficult to do so.

I will not go into depth about why I believe lisp is elegant. I may tackle it in another post, but that is not the point of this. I will, however, say that it is worth everyone having a dabble with lisp, and any language, regardless of whether it is directly useful for your career or what you want to do. Different programming languages give you different outlooks on problems. Some tasks are remarkably simple in one language compared to another. Being able to think in different ways about problems can therefore turn a problem which might otherwise seem overwhelming on its head, and you realise that you can take what you learned, and solve it in a different way.

I cannot lisp, but I'm going to keep trying.

This is the first post in a series about lisp. The next post is available here,