the lisp programming language family

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Someone mentioned in the xkcd thread that Lisp/Scheme are the greatest.

For those of you who have used some kind of Lisp, what do you think? (Preferably Common Lisp or Scheme, but bringing up Lush or even a canker sore like Emacs Lisp is acceptable.)

Personally, I feel that lazy functional languages such as Haskell are the best of all and I want to do my doctorate dissertation on lazy FP, but I'm going to hold off on Haskell until I have more knowledge of the mathematical topics involved in it (mainly category theory and the lambda calculus—Haskell is very hardcore).

So, for now at least, I will use Lisp, specifically Common Lisp. I've used it on again off again experimentally and very sporadically since—Jesus—when I was in middle school.

Scheme is a bit too minimal for my tastes. One of its original features, the concept of continuation, is very interesting, but Scheme is difficult to use practically IMO. Not least of all because of all the balkanization.

Common Lisp, although it is full of legacy crap and has a terrible community, is fairly close to being ideal. It balances power with ease of use very well in my opinion. It's challenging, but still fun and not mind-wracking. I'm up to Chapter 15 of Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (on recursion), where it finally starts to become interesting. I'll let you know how it goes.

I have no programming experience. Is Lisp easy to get started on? What can you do with it? What's the best way to start learning?

The thing about the lisps is that they make a programmer think in a completely new way. When I was introduced to it, shortly before I started with linux, it felt ALIEN. An amazing adventure.

and yet, its intuitive in a way.

We used Standard ML of New Jersey and Scheme in a computer science class back in college. The functional languages were an interesting intellectual curiosity since they require a very different approach from C, C++, Java, and the like. I find the sequential, procedural programming languages a bit easier to program in because it is less natural to rethink everything into stateless recursive algorithms. I'm more into programming for its practical applications than for abstract computer science, so I haven't really used any of them since college (at work there'd be zero use for them). I downloaded a Haskell 98 interpreter while at work and started reading a tutorial for a bit because I was bored, though.

With Lisp (or Scheme at least), you end up writing code like this:

I took that out of a textbook, and it really doesn't do much spectacular despite all the parantheses (Lisp-family languages aren't the most readable).

That's simply not true

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

The article doesn't mention lexical closure, which is available in Common Lisp and Scheme and is both easy to use and powerful. Plus Lisp variants do a decent job of supporting stateless programming, as you mentioned, though not quite as well as lazy FP tools.

Cambridge prefix notation is very easy to read when you indent properly.

Lisp is a crappy language. It's right here in the name: Lisp. Who the hell would want to have a lisp while programming?