[kinleyd]

Like Zach and you, pg's essays (plus Steve Yegge's rants), influenced me to learn Lisp.

Great interview. I'm on Arc, but will add SBCL because of Zach. :) Also, I remember Steve Yegge writing about how he barked up the wrong tree with Scheme (for purity) when he realized that Common Lisp may be crufty but was what got things done: http://langnostic.blogspot.com/2010/09/yegge-strikes-back-fr...

[Inaimathi]

Just to clarify; I am not in fact Steve Yegge (though I've been told I have a similar writing style), just a young lisper who read his essays.

[kinleyd]

Yes, you do have a similar writing style. From my list of Steve Yegge bookmarks, I was actually thinking of this one, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab..., where he says this:

"Problem 1: Which Lisp? Sorry, folks, but you can't trivialize this one. Let's say I'm a new would-be Lisper, just finished walking down that long damn Road, and now that I'm here, I'm ready to start using it. Which "it" should I use? The answer is "it depends", and that's pretty unfortunate, because right there you've just lost users. With Python or Ruby or Java, you've only got one language to choose from. Or at least you can be comfortable that there's a single canonical version, and the rest (e.g. Jython) are highly experimental territory.

Pick Scheme, and you have to pick a Scheme. Pick Common Lisp, and you have to pick a Common Lisp. Heck, there are even two or three flavors of Emacs-Lisp out there.

Most newcomers eventually (and independently) decide the same thing: Scheme is a better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work. CL has more libraries, and the implementations are somewhat more compatible than Scheme implementations, particularly with respect to macros. "

Since the full rant is tough on Lisp (and I like Lisp), and since you'd quoted most of the above, I was quick to pull the trigger on which to quote. Thanks for pointing it out.