I learned Common Lisp during the life of this HN account, and there's an amusing trajectory in my comments, from "I hear Lisp is beautiful and I'd love to learn it", through "Wait, Common Lisp is kind of a horrendous mess", to "OK, I get this, this is very cool".

Common Lisp genuinely expanded my thinking about programming, so I find this article's poetry analogy very apt. But part of this growth was clarifying my own preferences about programming, and some of CL's greatest strengths - extremely clever runtime meta-programming, CLOS, etc - are not actually things I want to work with in a code base at scale.

I also think the UX for CL, outside the commercial Lisps, is pretty grim. CL would greatly benefit from a rustup-cargo-like system with good dep management and sane beginner defaults, like wrapping the SBCL REPL in rlwrap. Haskell is more beginner friendly than CL right now, and that's quite the indictment.