The Year of LISP?

Posted 01/04/2024

It's a good year to turn some things around. I've always been a conceptual fan of functional programming, and have had my semi-yearly attempts to break into them but nothing really stuck. Recent weeks have finally seen some change to that with solid progress in Common Lisp stuff. Given the news, I'd like to spend 2024 really honing that. I think a good goal to myself is any new project started this year should be written in it, or another functional language. I'm a big fan of C and most of my projects have used it, but a change of scenery is good for the eyes. The day job is all C/++ anyhow so it's not like I won't get my fill.

Common Lisp has been generally nice to work with, but is a bit cumbersome in syntax and features. Lots of def* macros and loop forms are hard to use effectively without frequent backtracks to documentation. I worked with some Scheme in school and have had the Wizard book for just as long, so it might be nice to jump back to. Same goes for Haskell. Next week, I provide my own article on how monads are actually super easy and you just don't get it.

It might also be good timing, coming at the same time as experimentation with some other shakeups. Lots of my recent lisp learning has facilitated some Emacs familiarization, and I recently moved my home laptop to FreeBSD, which has been fun. Maybe I'll have some thoughts on the both of those soon enough?

If I do end up with some projects worth sharing, they'll go here.