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- Embed this notice@mia tl;dr yes it's not hard to learn and it's a really good language but it may ruin you for a lot of other shit that is used in mainstream tech stuff
my honest opinion is that it kind of depends. I feel like learning CL has actually ruined me for working in tech because it opened my eyes to how it's actually possible to design programming languages in a way that they empower you to solve problems rather than introducing new ones and essentially just piling more garbage on top of the mountain of garbage that most modern computing seems to be. so this is like an actual thing I would caution people of is if you want to stay ignorant and be able to continue to tolerate what most of programming is, you might end up regretting learning CL
some other things to keep in mind is that CL is a niche language and there are certain things it currently can't do very well because a lot of work needs to go into implementing certain things or settling on a standardized library for certain things. but it has been around a long, long time and the standard hasn't changed in like 30 years, so it's extremely stable, and there tends to be libraries available for most things, and if you write something in CL it will pretty much just work forever since you don't need to worry about the language constantly changing. and because of CL's macro system, programmers have been able to pick up with the ANSI standard leaves off (with things like networking and multithreading for instance) and make libraries that extend the core of the language with modern features
anyways that being said CL is a really good language and is like the only programming language I've used that has made me actually enjoy programming, and it's quite easy to learn imo because there is no syntax and you're expected to be constantly using the REPL to develop incrementally and experiment with stuff. the tooling around it is also amazing and also really lightweight, but you do need to use emacs fyi to really see the full power of CL since it's currently the best implementation of CL's tooling
the Common Lisp Cookbook is a good place to start quickly with it, or otherwise if you have the patience to go through a full book Practical Common Lisp is another thing that gets recommended a lot