Long ago I had bought a copy of "On Lisp", read pg's essays, and tried to get into Common Lisp. The issue I had at the time was the lack of a 'batteries include

Long ago I had bought a copy of "On Lisp", read pg's essays, and tried to get into Common Lisp. The issue I had at the time was the lack of a 'batteries included' lisp. At the time I ended up moving to Python instead. Recently, I've started using Clojure and think it'll rapidly become my go-to language (actually wrote about why just yesterday[1]). TL;DR is that I went looking for a faster alternative to Ruby, tried Go, ended up happy with Clojure for being dynamic, fast and functional. In the past I suppose the least common language I ended up with was TCL, about 9-10 years ago. The reason was that I wanted to develop a GUI application, but my attempts to learn GTK or Qt or Swing natively proved too complicated for me at the time. There was in fact a great TCL wrapper for GTK that turned out to be really easy to use. I ended up using TCL for several years and still have a fond memory of it. The coolest feature I remembered was being able to package up TCL into native, distributable packages - Starpacks[2] - complete with libraries, interpreter and app code in a single binary. Around 2000, this was amazing to me, and I was stunned more people weren't using it. I suspect one of the main things holding TCL back was in fact their lagging GUI support at the time. Mention TCL and people would wince at their memories of using Tk GUI apps. [1] https://hackworth.be/arriving-at-clojure/ https://hackworth.be/arriving-at-clojure/ [2] http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663 http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663