It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
Wow, wasn't expecting to see my post on here! Eventually, I want to write a follow-up, but I'm still a beginner.<p>Here's what I've liked about Common Lisp so far:<p>* The condition system is neat and I'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't quite know what will happen and don't want to lose context -- for example parsing data from a source you'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'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'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've been developing -- this isn't as big of an advantage these days with fast computers, VS Code, and language servers, but it's definitely retrofuturistic<p>There's also a few things I don't like:<p>* The most popular package manager (QuickLisp) is nice, but not nearly as featureful as I've become accustomed to with newer languages/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'm sure there are more pros/cons, but that's what came to mind just now.