Despite the interesting read, I had the same experience too except as a complete newbie.<p>I tried redefining the plus operator to see how flexible the language really was (after, you know, all the talk of its power). I&#x27;d led myself into a rabbit hole with a macro. The guys in #lisp fairly and in humour told me that using eval in a macro indicates my macro is wrong. Second, I&#x27;m trying to redefine a core operator so I should read up on packages. Despite that, they guided me to get my macro working anyway to conclude my sandbox play with success.<p>I remember being very grateful for their help and feeling like it was a community I wouldn&#x27;t mind being a part of.<p>I imagine with a dumb rookie mistake like that, I should have had my self esteem shredded to dust. Instead, I carried on dabbling and reading. I&#x27;m no CL programmer but I know more than I did that day so I wasn&#x27;t put off in the slightest.<p>EDIT: I just remembered they advised I could make my day job more interesting by writing my own way to inline CL code in PHP as a good project to up the ante.