For the past few months I've been studying Lisp, reading SICP, and just trying to become more familiar with the concepts. Like many people, I was put off by Lis

For the past few months I've been studying Lisp, reading SICP, and just trying to become more familiar with the concepts. Like many people, I was put off by Lisp's seemingly arcane syntax, which now feels beautiful to me. I can't fully explain it, but for years I had been searching for a way to reduce and abstract duplication in the structure of my code. (There's a fundamental difference between this, and simply pulling something out into a function or method.) It wasn't until I came across a great explanation of homoiconicity and macros that I became "enlightened." Lisp was what I was looking for all along. One day, I tried explaining it to my manager, and he just couldn't get it. It wasn't clicking. Until I showed him a demo of symbolic differentiation (a la SICP), at which point he said, "Holy shit," and sat there for a few minutes considering all the implications. That was one of the greatest moments we ever shared together.