Great write-up. Indeed, the journey with Lisp is an interesting one and what you have witnessed seems to parallel many others experiences. What I found on my j

Great write-up. Indeed, the journey with Lisp is an interesting one and what you have witnessed seems to parallel many others experiences. What I found on my journey with Lisp: - I learnt Emacs well and learnt the beauty of its codebase and the thoughtfulness put into the program. Its' levels of documentation and customisation and being a lisp machine in its own rights was an enlightening experience for me when designing my own software (i.e. document well, document in a standardised way, document thoughtfully (think of what the users would want to know) and providing customisability to end users (which to be honest, dynamic langauges like Lisp excel at because they are much better suited for runtime manipulation and optimisation - The power of macros to change one's language. Now admittedly, this took some time to get a handle on. You kinda need to be proficient in Lisp before you start doing some super funky stuff and mould your language and program together into one (Ala PG's On Lisp). But having the ability to change the language at _compile_ time is simply, utterly, most imaginably amazing! - Writing clearer code: Because Lisp has very little punctuation syntax (not to be confused with the syntax of certain special forms), you cannot hide behind boilerplate code as much and you end up having to face your own thoughts more directly in the code you write. It is tough going at the start (who would have thought a _simple_ language would actually be hard to program in well - basically the more complexity in a language, the more restriction to your expressiveness, the more simple a language, the more power to you to fully express yourself by combining orthogonal blocks...speaking generally here as sometimes complexity does help in other ways (e.g. see CLOS)) - Learning from the greats in Computer Science - there is so many good ideas and thoughts embedded into the lisps, that you inevitably learn a lot of good things by immersing yourself in the language and its history (of course over time) And finally, 'Life Beyond Lisp'. I no longer program in Common Lisp as my main language because I do need some libraries that I cannot do without. But as you alluded in your post on writing better JS after Lisp, I too have significantly improved my programming and code clarity in these other languages, after learning Lisp. Of course, one day I hope to program exclusively in CLOS, but until that day, Swift remains my near friend (at least it has generic functions). I can wholeheartedly recommend Common Lisp to anyone who has some spare time and curiosity to improve their skills in our profession of computer science. Also (and this is something Lispers don't seem to do that well), try other languages! Learn from them all in my humble opinion. Computer Science is a wonderful thing :) p.s. Congrats to Kandria on their progress. Truly a wonderful team and their main author is a wonderful open-source lisper.