When I first started with Perl everything seemed very magical for me and it was a lot of fun. Need to scrape text from 4k pages of a website? Cool. Done. Need to do extract some pattern of text or perhaps save the world? Cool. Done. As you grow with Perl you also grow with regex ofcourse. Suddenly you think of a different way to solve a simple problem with regular expressions. Why? Because its clever to do so for now. With the joy of Perl I came across the book “Higher Order Perl” by “Mark Jason Dominus” which stated that it shares most of the characteristics with Lisp. I took an intial look and bewildered around why such a language is compared with Perl. Maybe that the author intended a pun on the language by potraying a Perl as little estoreic but it turned out it was not so. As you lurk around different communities or with more proggit Lisp. I got even more suspicious about as many prestigious universities and many renowned hackers always laud about the power of Lisp.

“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.” - Eric S. Raymond, “How to Become a Hacker”

Hence I thought of playing around with Lisp and came to find out that Lisp comes in different flavours and Scheme seemed to be a good one as the famous SICP book was using it which deserves an another post. I installed MIT-Scheme and started doing some little exercises with fair experience of Python’s map, filter and reduce everything looked a little familiar except that the language encouraged to think in terms of maps and filters unlike Python which has limited functional programming constructs. The parenthesis started annoying me a lot like the typical Lisp beginner experience. It was really hard to visualise the code and recursion seemed very stupid and inefficient from Python’s perspective and Lisp does require a significant amount of change in the thought process. Its always a hard thing to look something from an entirely different perspective as learning usually involves associating things with previous experiences and coming up with conclusions. Finally I have decided to give a good go at a Lisp and post back my experiences here.

I have chosen Clojure as it seems a fairly good Lisp with JVM as its host language giving access to a wide range of Java libraries and I also got inspired by Rich Hickey’s presentations.