Lately, I do almost all my programming in Lisp. That might be Scheme, Emacs Lisp, or Common Lisp. I’ve written many times on why I prefer Lisp as a development environment. I like the syntax, and most importantly that it enables what I’ve described as experimental or incremental programming. It’s easy to try bits of code as small as an expression. My go to example of this is Kris Jenkins’ using the technique to build a Spotify client in Elisp that runs in Emacs in less than 16 minutes.
Recently, I came across an article from LispWorks about the the advantages of Lisp and the myths surrounding it. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen the article before but I couldn’t find any date on it—or even in the HTML source—and I couldn’t find any Irreal posts about it. In any event, it’s an interesting read and should be very useful to those who aren’t familiar with Lisp and don’t know what a great tool it can be. Or even worse, have heard and believe those stale old myths about Lisp being slow, big, interpreted only, and that it needs special hardware to run well.
None of those myths are true and the article does a good job of debunking them. If you’re not a Lisper, you should take a look at the article to discover why you might want to be. Watch Jenkins’ video and discover how delightful writing in Lisp can be. If you’re an Emacs user, you can experiment with the builtin Emacs Lisp and experience the power of Lisp for yourself.