The Hard and the Powerful

I stumbled upon Lisp recently and have started fiddling around with it. It seems to be an entirely new world altogether. Being a C/C++ and now a Java programmer, Lisp looks HARD. Nevertheless, I read a lot of good things about it here, here etc.. (and some bad things as well). After struggling a bit with the various implementations of lisp available, I narrowed down to one of them, got it running on my machine and started coding some simple "Hello World"ish programs and reading this book.

I was a bit sceptical after seeing the extensive use of parenthesis and prefix notation ( One of the 'bad' things I've heard about lisp is this : Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses). I almost felt that I was wasting my time on a complicated obsolete language. But I'm feeling a lot better now. I guess its just a matter of geting accustomed to it.
And maybe one more thing I miss is a good IDE with all the features like autocomplete, refactoring, etc. But that's not a fault of the language. Probably I have not come across one yet. However, thats not going to stop me from continuing with my Lisping.

One thing is for sure: Lisp definitely IS a powerful programming language.

Found this quote interesting:

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

The First Link

I finally decided to start voicing the gymnastics that happen in my mind. I think it is better to throw them out rather than let them rot inside. I have no idea what I'm going to spit out here. It may range from technological crap to the high philosophical truths, from my madness about music to my analysis of just maybe anything i find analysable. Let me see how this turns out to be.
I am currently reading a book on Socrates, and he was speaking about the chain of thoughts as a chain which binds/constrains the power of expression in men. Maybe thats one of the reason for the title of my blog.