Developing with lisp

I recently started working for a new company that uses Ruby on Rails. I found that learning the language itself was pretty simple, and the tooling around it was pretty good. I was especially impressed with how much I enjoyed working with a ‘console’ that allowed me to introspect various aspects of the code I’m working with. Being able to do that makes debugging less of a painful activity. This was a shift from my previous experience working mostly with Java code, where I didn’t have as much visibility into the workings of my code without relying on a debugger.

Anyway, I’m always wanting to learn something new, and I was in search of a language that I would enjoy working in. I think I might have found that in Lisp. Some of the things I like about it:

• It is very simple to get started with while also having very powerful metaprogramming capabilities.
• It is FAST. More specifically, the SBCL implementation that I’ve been using has pretty good performance.
• It has really nice introspection capabilities. Like the Rails console I’ve had the pleasure of working with, Lisp seems to be even more suited for introspection. I’ve invested a good amount of time getting my Emacs setup to the point where writing, debugging, and navigating Lisp code is wonderful.

I feel like my initial introduction to the language was a bit turbulent since I attempted to rely on search engines as I do for most other languages I’ve tried learning. At least with Emacs (and with Doom Emacs more specifically), I’ve realized I don’t really need to leave my editor to figure things out. Everything I need to write code is simply a few keystrokes away from being discovered. I really hope the language regains the recognition it deserves and gets back in the spotlight, as I want to work more with it.