I belong to those people who tried to get into lisp and gave up, because the confusion to navigate per potential advantage over my major language (python) was too large. My background is a knowledge in C, Python and Java, using Python mostly. I mostly looked into lisp, because I kept encountering something I call the syntactic barrier when I tried to remove duplication from my code, and I knew: lisp had macros. Macros could break this barrier. So looking into lisp looked promising.

I didn't care too much about the syntax, a good editor fixes this without a problem and it was a good opportunity to look into emacs a bit (usually, I use vim). Surfing through the chapters of practical common lisp when pretty well and understanding was not exactly hard.

However after that, I was faced with confusion. There is a boatload of lisp dialects, each with a boatload of implementations and each implementation as another boatload of libraries that do something looking similar to what other implementations libraries do without being the same or compatible. How am I supposed to select any of these without having a clue? After a few days of back and forth, I decided to close the book lisp for me, because I could not find a way through this wall of selections -- at least not without investing a lot of time. Too much time for too little benefit over python.

HTH, Tetha