Why You Should Learn Lisp In 2025

This video is focused on Lisp a collection of languages I have fallen in love with and think many of you will do the same.

My video on learning Racket

Scheme introduction I like

Recompiling a video game without stopping it in Common Lisp

Reference for why I compare Lisps performance to that of C

Let me know what you think and if there is anything specific you would like to learn about.

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00:00 Intro
01:33 Scheme
02:00 Common Lisp
02:55 Clojure
04:44 Easy to start learning
05:34 Simple Syntax
09:48 Code as Data
15:01 Will always exist
15:42 It only gets better with age
16:08 The REPL
18:58 Lisp can do ANYTHING
20:07 Outro

[silencioseu]

Just a note at the beginning. CL, Scheme and Clojure are not "implementations" of LISP but rather different languages in the Lisp-family of languages, or more simply different Lisp dialects, and as you've mentioned each of them have multiple implementations. Also Clojure is by far the most popular Lisp nowadays.

[russellwaterhouse]

I had looked into lisp early last year, and couldn't wrap my head around the bracketing syntax. It all makes sense after you explained it as building an abstract syntax tree! Thanks for the paradigm shift!

[バオバイバー]

To cut a really long story short, frustration with some other languages have lead me to make my own language, with the compiler written in Common Lisp. The language is also s-expressions, so we just use the lisp reader and walk the AST right into LLVM. We basically get to skip writing like 80% of the compiler, and honestly I'm wondering why on Earth anyone bothers with other syntaxes at all. Using Common Lisp has been a blast and honestly I am wondering if I should just drop the new language and do everything in CL.

[unformedvoid]

You convinced me that I definetelly should give Lisp a try. After learning F# I understood that programming can be much more powerful than stupid OOP and it gave me my interest in programming back. Now I understand that it can be even more powerful than I can comprehend now and I will never truly understand it before I check it myself and learn new higher-level techniques. Functional programming already made me a better developer. I hope that homoiconicity, macros, code as data will make me even better :)

[eisnheim]

Beautiful presentation, looking forward to learning it this year.

[shaunkruger]

I remember working on a project in the mid 2000s where I was trying to build a lab inventory management system using LispWorks. The app was killed before it was ever finished, but the time I spent learning lisp and it’s features was time incredibly well spent for helping me to learn how to think about solving problems and it educated me about how a language can influence the the thoughts you can have and the solutions you can come up with.

I always tell people that lisp bent my mind in all the best ways and I always think of it fondly.

[Aviator]

Wow. I haven't touched this one for 30+ yet. Back then, it was one of the best AI languages. The fastest machine that was available to us was x286 (the IBM AT) and we were running common lisp.

[PixelOutlaw]

The best reason for learning Lisp is for how well it covers many paradigms. You've got the CLOS, you've got first class functions with optional arguments, named arguments, defaulted arguments, and variadic arguments. You've got notions of streams of data. Not to mention the ability to truly extend the language at the syntax level via macros which are quite different than text substitution. SBCL is a very good implementation of Common Lisp - it's faster than you might expect and the compiler writers are always adding new tweaks to make it faster. If you want a minimal pure Lisp consider a Scheme like Chicken. If you learn Common Lisp you'll also learn quite a bit of Emacs Lisp since they sort of share a similar branch on the family tree (there are differences though).

[xtra]

What is stopping me learning Lisp in 2022 is the fact that we're in 2024. But I just started to learn it and I'm quite excited.

[computerguymiguel]

Very interesting, I got a little into lisp for my emacs config, but now you convinced me to try it out for some other things as well

[topcivilian]

Awesome video, my friend..!!
The google algorithm brought me here and
you just got a like and a new subscriber.

[coppereva]

I have yet to use lisp yet, but already knew how basic math was written in it, and didn't really understand why however. I never got why it was written like '+ 1 1' instead of the more natural '1 + 1'. But your explanation on how it actually gets evaluated really clears that up. And also makes sense that this more literal robust method makes the order of operations always clear.

[marc-andrebrun]

racket is the way to go for :
- a very nice IDE, drracket;
- one of the best documentation I ever seen;
- a lot of librairies about any topics
- and in scheme, a lot of very nice teaching material available.

[unbekannter_Nutzer]

In the right split window at 18:00, it is unreadable - dark grey on light black? You should go for a stronger contrast when doing videos.
And a much bigger font wouldn't hurt, too, when showing only few lines of short demo code. I understand that you might use a small font on real work, where you prefer having much of it on the screen.

[messengerofiexist]

Lisp wasn’t a language until 1960 when MccCarthy published his paper on a list processor. Another gentleman read the paper and built and compiled becoming the first Lisp usage.

[pwojtcza]

Got here from SystemCrafters stream. Thank you for this content, always wanted to start learning common-lisp but never had a good justification for time investment

[stephenaustin]

I have no idea why Kent Dybvig called his implementation "Chez Scheme", but "chez" is a French word, meaning "at the house of" or "at the home of", and is pronounced "shay". As in, for example "Chez Panisse", Alice Waters' famous restaurant in Berkeley, CA.

[paulo]

I was on the fence about spending time to learn Lisp this year or not, but you convinced me to do so. I think I'll start out by learning Scheme and then I'll probably move on to CL or emacs Lisp.

[boots]

I was going to bail when the s-exp explanation started, however you made it very, very understandable. Thanks!

[sighupcmd]

I love lisp, but when codebase becomes big enough, it's really hard to keep in mind all the symbols in head, that force to constantly reference the documentation and double check if the map key is spelled correctly or it can be silenlty ignored, and so on. All this really drops productivity, and you got really little help from editor. At the end i tiered of this. if I'd got back in my 15, when I had lots of time, then yes, pure pleasure. Currently I got back to statically typed languages (rust and elm as mains, and Haskell for joy).
Lisps are too dynamic to me, I had a feeling of permanently not being sure if I didn't introduce side effects by adding pure code. Deadloop. But lisps are always in my ❤️