I tried to avoid it. I really did. I had bookmarked Rich Hickey’s video, “Clojure for Lisp Programmers” and it sat there on my delicious list like a fresh packet of heroin on a junkie’s dresser.
I didn’t want to get immersed in a new language. About a year ago, I’d gone through a bad Haskell addiction and I had nothing to show for it but a stack of monad tutorials and a bunch of puzzle code. And I was busy: I had a job, after all, and a family and a billion activities. Plus I was busy working on a side project using some real technologies: Ruby on Rails and Facebook. Technologies that let you build deployable applications without building big teams.
But one fateful day in November, I opened that video. An hour later, it was pretty much all over. From watching Rich present Clojure, it was clear that he got it. He got both why people love Lisp and why people who love Lisp end up using Python, Haskell, Ruby, or even Java.