My first exposure to Lisp was through a combination of Hacker News, SICP, and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence. Also, there may have been a blog post by one

My first exposure to Lisp was through a combination of Hacker News, SICP, and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence. Also, there may have been a blog post by one of the Posterous (or a similar company) guys about getting started with SBCL for web services. At the time, although I could read the material, it seemed to require too much mentally to actually Get Things Done. I think it was a deep misunderstanding about how to structure a program that is independent of state. Later, after playing with Scala, amongst other languages, I came to understand that state exists in functional programs. It's not conjured up out of nowhere, spontaneously brought into existence, but rather, it exists as data, and it is the job of the program to direct the flow of data appropriately - like a plumbing system, so to speak.