[spindle]

I first came across lisp in the 80s, when I briefly worked in AI.

Lisp taught me (this is the motivational bit for you) the power of a few well thought out orthogonal abstractions. Almost all other languages seem to me to be a mixture of leaky, non-orthogonal abstractions.

I've always loved lisp, but since I discovered Smalltalk and Self and Io (a few years later) I've loved those languages even more than Lisp.

So I've found it hard to go back to Lisp.

But actually Lisp is much better than my favourite languages, because there are no implementations of my favourite languages that are really well tied into the unix ecosystem (and the ones that come closest are hobby projects that are full of compiler bugs). So if a paternalistic god would like to tie me down and force me to go back to Lisp, that would probably be a good thing. I would definitely choose Scheme - possibly guile for the minimalism and because Andy Wingo's blog makes my head spin, but probably Racket.

[divyaranjan1905]

Ah, working in the 80s with Lisp and AI, that's pretty awesome! Thank you for sharing this, but my functional mind would just ask...how have you liked Haskell compared to any of the Lisp(s)?

[spindle]

To answer your question directly, Haskell is too hard for me :-( I'm a pretty crap programmer - I was a professional back when you didn't have to be GOOD at it, you just had to be able to do it!

More interestingly, I wonder whether Haskell has, or lacks, the careful choice of orthogonal features that I love in a language.

[throwaway81523]

You might try OCaml. Haskell (like Common Lisp) is more a big soup of features than a carefully chosen orthogonal set. Standard ML (SML) is maybe more orthogonal than OCaml, but less used in practice.

[spindle]

Interesting - thank you!