Hmm- gonna get flamed here, no matter what I say, so... I'll try to be a bit delicate, but not going to put too much effort into delicacy.

I understand loving CL. CL was, I think, the first programming language I really loved passionately, for itself I loved programming in C passionately before that, but in retrospect it was more a matter of having gazed from afar at the machine for so long, and suddenly realizing that C would bring me much closer to her than BASIC had. C was just an intermediary, though I did not understand that at the time. We have good relations to this day, but I'm afraid I do not love her, and never really did. I just used her to get close to the machine.

I still love the machine, but, as they say, familiarity breeds contempt, and it eventually became apparent that we would be better off at some remove from each other. No judgment- it's just that I happen to be fairly abstract, and the machine likes to pretend to be concrete (on some level I suppose she is, but I'm pretty sure we never dug that deep in our relationship.) I suppose that that was, perhaps not so co-incidentally, right around the time I met CL again.

I'd flirted with CL in University AI classes, even worked with her a bit in a computer vision lab, and I'd always thought she was attractive, if a little off-beat. But then I fell for her, obsessively, and for a while she was all I could think about.

I cherish our time together. I was such a bumpkin when we met, and she challenged me at every turn. "Why," she'd ask, "must a byte have eight bits?" And I'd be forced to admit that she was right-a truly inclusive computing culture ought to accept bytes of all different sizes. I won't get into our discussions of filesystems here.

And I was introduced to her friends. What a lively bunch they were, and what a smart bunch. I remember I once asked her friend Erik for the time and... well, actually he suggested that I might want to start carrying a watch or just go home and kill myself, but then he explained some things about time that I carry with me to this day. He was the most provocative of CL's friends, but many of her other friends were not only brilliant, but perhaps monotonically increasingly old and disappearing.

The great thing about CL is that it has a standard that is hard to change. The worst thing about CL is that it has a standard that is hard to change. For many years the former overcame the latter. I'm inclined to think that that is no longer the case.

So, pretty much, why CL?