Paul Graham wrote "On Lisp" which I have not completely gotten through
(only so much time in the day). He got the rights to make it available
on-line for free.

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

On 9/19/05, Robbie Carlton <robbie.carlton / gmail.com> wrote:
> I would wholeheartedly recomend lisp.
> It's definitely alternative
> It's more practical than you might have heard
> It's not as difficult as you seem to think. Common lisp is big, and yes car
> cdr and cons are funny names for functions, but after that the majority of
> function names are self explanatory almost to the point of verbosity, and
> I've never met a programmer yet who couldn't remember the name of three
> functions.
> But the most important point is that lisp is fun.
> Really really really fun.
> So fun that it was the deciding factor in me becoming a professional
> programmer. If it wasn't for lisp I would be doing something completely
> different for a living right now (maybe teaching English).
> I took up Ruby because Lisp is not supported on many servers yet (waiting
> for arc), and ruby is as close as it gets in terms of flexibilty,
> expressiveness and power. But there are some things that you can only do in
> lisp.
> 
> I'm paraphrasing/misquoting someone here (probably Paul Graham)
> 
> "Lisp turns the easy, boring and tedious task of solving your problem into
> the difficult but interesting task of extending the language"
> 
> This is the heart of whats amazing about lisp: macros (which are not like
> macros in C, so don't even think it.) let you extend and redifine the
> language however you want.
> And don't worry about the parens, they quickly sink below your conscoius
> awareness.
> 
> check out www.paulgraham.com <http://www.paulgraham.com> for extremely
> interesting lisp advocacy from a man who is a millionaire(or at least very
> rich) off the back of lisp.
> 
> And I'm sorry to get so fanatical about another language in a ruby list. I
> still love you ruby.
> 
> On 9/19/05, James Edward Gray II <james / grayproductions.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 18, 2005, at 11:32 PM, Kev Jackson wrote:
> >
> > > Lisp - got playing with this on a very boring business trip
> > > (there's an online interpreter somewhere, google for Lisp
> > > tutorial). Pros
> > > - you can do pretty much anything with it (the tutorial leads
> > > you through writing your own mini-language for an old school
> > > adventure game, it was an eye-opener how easy it was).
> >
> > I'm interested in this tutorial, if you wouldn't mind providing a
> > link. I did some Googling, but couldn't seem to come up with it.
> >
> > James Edward Gray II
> >
> >
> >
> 
>