I keep hearing about Common Lisp, but I just don't "get it". Is it really as mind-blowing as people say when you "get it"?

I held off learning LISP for many years, always thinking "one day I'll get to it". Because the syntax looked funky (even though I used other languages such as Haskell which has a "non-traditional" syntax).

Eventually I just dove in, and grew to appreciate the language. The homoiconicity (the code is data, and thus data can be used as code) is something that did excite me.

Unfortunately, I never got good with LISP. Whenever I wanted to do a 'real-world' thing, I ended up fighting with the package manager. Having outdated dependencies, not managing my deps correctly or just not finding deps for things that I wanted to use.

Which also deepened my believe that programming is more about the ecosystem than the language. I love functional programming, I really enjoy Haskell and I'll solve small things (Advent of Code) in LISP. But once I need a library I'll use Go, Python or Java, or _any_ other common lang.

I'd recommend learning it though!

EDIT: I just said LISP here, but I always used the CL (Common Lisp) implementation. And I run it with SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp)

vindarel

I find the package manager actually great. Quicklisp works with monthly "distributions" that are tested to load together, rather than libs that must be strictly pinned and updated separately like everywhere else. I can understand the ecosystem problem, but it might be way better than one thinks: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Also, Quicklisp can be completed with http://ultralisp.org/, a distribution that builds every 5 minutes and to which it is trivial to add a library. There's also Qlot for local dependencies, and more.