I/O Reader

So I've just downloaded the book Practical Common Lisp from Apress. Over the past few months I have been thinking of learning a new programming language. My first choice was C++, then I decided on Java because I took an introductory course to it last semester. Java and C++ share a lot of syntax commonalities with PHP and Javascript/Actionscript so learning them just didn't feel interesting. My other idea was to learn Python, for no real reason beside the fact that it seemed cool. For some reason I never got around to that...

A while ago I read a few essays about Lisp by Paul Graham. They got me curious but it wasn't until a recent article that cam up on Digg that really sparked my interest. The article was about how Lisp is the "Ducati of Programming Languages". It made it seem interesting, so I checked out the rest of the person's blog and this really sparked my interest. I read over most of it and decided that at some point I should learn lisp.

The last piece of the puzzle came because of javascript. I *love* fooling around with javascript. One thing I especially like is the lambda-style function calls that you can do in it. After reading this post on Isaac Schlueter's blog I knew I needed to find some way to learn it.

So, here's to me and my hopeful success with this new language... But first, I need to figure out how to get it to work on my Mac!