Enlightenment doesn't come from actually using LISP, I've concluded, after years of feeling dumb about it. It comes from understanding how LISP is built. Once y

Enlightenment doesn't come from actually using LISP, I've concluded, after years of feeling dumb about it. It comes from understanding how LISP is built. Once you understand how LISP is built, you'd never actually use it for a serious project. My key take aways from learning how LISP is built: 1) Code & data can be unified into the same thing. This isn't particularly deep if you know the concept of an AST. 2) You can bootstrap a language from a simplified version of the language. Repeat this a few times and you get a fancy language. This isn't particularly deep if you've built any compiler, or if you've built LaTeX. 3) You can build beautiful things if you disregard the grittiness of reality. LISP offers an abstraction of physical computers that does not at all resemble a real computer. Some people like this abstraction. Maybe because they don't like how computers actually work.