One of the biggest obstacles for a beginner is that learning Lisp doesn't actually mean just learning Lisp, but also learning to think in a very different way, and working with a completely unfamiliar toolset - emacs being probably the most prominent member of the latter category.

Since most resources tend to focus on only one of these problems, I decided to blog about my journey learning everything at once, in the hopes that the obstacles I encounter and overcome might help others as well. I'll be tagging all posts with the tag #learninglisp, so they're easy to find.

I am targeting this at an audience of programmers who have experience working in "mainstream" languages on projects of non-trivial sizes - if you're the "Java/JavaScript/Python/PHP/... developer with 3-5 years of experience" everyone seems to be looking for, this is for you. However, I won't be assuming knowledge of any particular language or language feature, only general knowledge. In short, if the terms 'class', 'version control', 'thread', 'unit testing', 'package manager', 'OTEL', 'SQL' etc. are things you encounter every day, you're part of my target audience.

Let's go!