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This is a bit tangential but what helped me most in picking up Lisp was writing my own. Until I worked through Make A Lisp [0] I don't think I really "got" Lisp. You can work in whatever language you're familiar with. You build a Lisp similar to Clojure and learn a lot of important concepts by implementing them.

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal

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I didn't write my own but started hacking[0] on an existing implementation -- you learn quite a bit about the underlying language by tracking down bugs as you implement (or port) features in the interpreter. I was trying to get the parser up to an actual parser for the language (which produces a lot of 'language learning experiences') but got distracted with adding unicode support (which hasn't really taught me anything new about scheme...)

[0] https://github.com/eponymous/yocto-scheme

I'm doing the same thing right now. I have tried to get into lisp a couple of times, but this time it's the first time I "get it".

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