It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
Wow, wasn&#x27;t expecting to see my post on here! Eventually, I want to write a follow-up, but I&#x27;m still a beginner.<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve liked about Common Lisp so far:<p>* The condition system is neat and I&#x27;ve never used anything like it -- you can easily control code from afar with restarts<p>* REPL-driven programming is handy in situations where you don&#x27;t quite know what will happen and don&#x27;t want to lose context -- for example parsing data from a source you&#x27;re unfamiliar with, you can just update your code and continue on instead of having to save, possibly compile, and restart from the very beginning<p>* Common Lisp has a lot of implementations and there&#x27;s a good deal of interoperability -- I was able to swap out implementations to trade speed (SBCL) for memory usage (CLISP) in one case (multiple compatible implementations is one of the reasons I&#x27;ve been leaning towards CL instead of Scheme for learning a Lisp)<p>* Even as an Emacs noob, the integration with Common Lisp is excellent, and it works great even on my super slow netbook where I&#x27;ve been developing -- this isn&#x27;t as big of an advantage these days with fast computers, VS Code, and language servers, but it&#x27;s definitely retrofuturistic<p>There&#x27;s also a few things I don&#x27;t like:<p>* The most popular package manager (QuickLisp) is nice, but not nearly as featureful as I&#x27;ve become accustomed to with newer languages&#x2F;ecosystems<p>* Since the language itself is frozen in time, you need lots of interoperability libraries for threads, synchronization, command line arguments, and tons of other things<p>* I really, really wish SBCL could support fully static builds, to enable distributing binaries to non-glibc Linux distributions<p>I&#x27;m sure there are more pros&#x2F;cons, but that&#x27;s what came to mind just now.