The Landscape of Lisp

Lisp is a family of programming languages with a long, rich and oftentimes confusing tradition. Unware of it at the time, in 1960 John McCarthy published a paper that over the next 64 years would spawn a thousand dialects and a number of very good ideas. The fragmentation of the Lisp family from an outside perspective can seem really confusing to newcomers, like a software Tower of Babel. In fact the variety of Lisp is in my opinion one of it's best qualities. It almost guarantees that as long as you can overcome the (relatively) small barriers of the paren-heavy syntax and prefix notation that there will be a dialect and community that closely mirrors your philosophy on software development. The purpose of this post isn't to convince the reader of how great Lisp is; rather, I assume the reader is already somewhat interested and is now trying to figure out which of these dialects is the best fit for them. It also isn't about "which Lisp is the best" type questions, but instead it's j ... Read full article.