Learning Common Lisp to beat Java and Rust on a phone encoding problem
I write Clojure for food, and Common Lisp for fun. One reason for the latter is CL's speed -- awhile back I compared a bit of (non-optimized) Clojure code I wrote for a blog post with a rough equivalent in CL, and was stunned that the Common Lisp code ran about 10x faster.  This made me curious as to how fast it could be made if I really tried, and was able to get nearly 30x more[1] by optimizing it.Clojure is definitely fast enough for everything I've done professionally for six years.  But Common Lisp, while having plenty of rough edges, intrigues on the basis of performance alone.  (This is on SBCL -- I have yet to play with a commercial implementation.)[1] http://johnj.com/from-elegance-to-speed.html