Comment by onetimeuse92304

> Perhaps counterintuitively, the hardest people to teach Common Lisp to in my experience have been "senior software engineers" who transition into the project, who are so dead-set on their preferred languages and tools

That's essentially my experience. There is something about developers... they learn a new language but most people never really learn a new way of thinking.

I worked with one guy who tried to learn Common Lisp and even after a year on the project his code was essentially Java written in Lisp.

But this isn't really a problem with Lisp, specifically. I had the same problem with pretty much every programming language. Just recently I had fun debating the usefulness of Kotlin as a programming language. In my experience, for all the features Kotlin has, every single Kotlin program I have ever seen looks like a Java program translated line by line to Kotlin. Which is to say none of the Kotlin features are actually used to solve any important problems like reducing complexity of the application.

> Common Lisp doesn't have too many particularly odd language features;

I would say for most developers I worked with the biggest challenge was always getting the idea of macros. There is technically no reason to use macros. But if you do not use macros you are not really programming Lisp.

The point of macros is the reversal of the programming process. In a regular programming language, you get a bunch of tools and then you learn the tools and then you figure out how to write program using the tools.

In Lisp, you figure out how you want your program to be written, and then make tools that make it possible. It is quite a big shift in thinking that many people have trouble with.

Once I got this, I am now using similar technique in other programming languages. I am looking at my problem and extracting the core complexity and try to figure out what would be the best way to write that complexity down as code. Then I figure out all the machinery to make it happen. It not as elegant as in lisp but it still leads to way better and more readable code at least where it matters.