I tried Emacs Lisp in 1996, and started writing a medium-sized program. Unfortunately, it mostly felt like I was trying to write C code in Lisp, and enlightenment never appeared.
However, I still had a feeling I was missing out on something, and in particular I remembered being impressed with how quickly a friend of mine had written a Lisp program to create 3D animations for a LED display. So I bought CLtL2 in case I'd get an urge to learn more about Lisp.
Then, in early 2001, I read Paul
Graham's "Beating the
Averages" and once again became curious. I started reading CLtL2,
and even though the basics were familiar from Emacs Lisp, I was amazed
at the richness of the language.
I have now finished PAIP, Graham's
"ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp",
Keene's "Object-Oriented Programming in COMMON LISP" and some more
Lisp books. I've yet to write
more than small snippets of code, but I now have a few interesting ideas
to try out in Lisp.