Lisp was my first real programming language many years ago and the superior environment of Lisp machines (which I had the chance to use from the mid-80s until the mid-90s) is what I still miss today. I dabbled with Fortran IV and Pascal too early on, a bit later with C too, at the same time, but I always found the need to manually manage storage (How long to plan a string? Or how large should an array be?) annoying.

Lisp offered me the freedom to think (and program) in abstract terms. As did (and does), BTW, Perl (especially with regexps, another great abstract tool), where memory management is nothing to care about unless your RAM isn't sufficient ;-0)

When I had to describe the different programming languages to lay people, I used to compare programming in Lisp with using a helicopter and a camera to collect data for map production, while other languages are similar to some earth bound vehicles and a tape measure. Yes, learning to fly a helicopter is more complicated than learning to drive (a bicycle or car) but once you managed the learning curve, you could produce much better results much faster (aka prototyping). And, of course, there are fewer pilots than drivers to chat with.

Here's an interesting (not so recent) talk by Peter Norvig where he summarized the Lisp perspective:

"Lisp: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" http://www.norvig.com/lisp_talk_final.htm

I had a similar experience, doing my first 3D graphics development on Symbolics Lisp Machines back in the 80's [1], and then spending my career developing 3D CG code in Fortran, C, and C++, missing the Lisp experience the whole time.

Some of the milestones along the way: - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.

Now I have returned to Common Lisp with a new open source 3D system [2], and it feels really good. As I deliberate over innumerable design decisions, the one thing I have told myself I will not consider changing is the choice of language. New, popular, hot, trendy languages (Clojure, Julia) may monopolize the conversation, but I am content with what Common Lisp allows me to do.

[1]: https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-... [2]: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

I should re-read the Norvig paper...