Welcome to The Code Lisperer!

It's taken me a very long time to formulate a concept for a professional blog to which I could commit fully, but at long last, here is mine.

The purpose of The Code Lisperer is to share my two-plus decades of experience and insights as a mostly self-educated software professional, and to promote a way of thinking about the art and craft of software construction that I believe will help others starting out or seeking to take their skills to new levels to experience key epiphanies that I have had, sooner than I did.

While I cannot Vulcan mind-meld my knowledge and experience into anyone's skulls, I can at least take the time to capture the "Aha!" moments that have shaped my practice of the art in a way that hopefully saves you, Dear Reader, some pain.

As the name of the blog suggests, I will mainly be using Lisp to present these ideas. There will of course be some Java or JavaScript here, a dash of C, C++, or C# there, and a heaping serving of Haskell, Ocaml, or Erlang for desert, but by focusing primarily on the venerable Lisp family of programming languages - including Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure(Script), LFE (Lisp-Flavored Erlang), and others - I aim to stay as close "to the metal" of the Lambda Calculus as possible.

More precisely, I want to take advantage of both Lisp's syntactic simplicity and its astonishing semantic flexibility, mainly to make my contributions "evergreen." Yeah, and I guess I do kind of want to "sell" you on it. Every proper Lisp enjoys more or less both of these rare traits in a unique balance, and I have come (alas, too late!) to understand just how important and powerful these features are in practice.

"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory." -- famous proverb

But more important to me than whether or not you adopt Lisp on your next project, or even at all, I want you to have a clear idea of the pragmatics as well as the possibilities of software problem-solving that are often drowned out by complex tooling, misguided marketecture, and commodity programming trends that can sadly make the work more of a slog or rat-race than a science or art.

At present I plan two major kinds of posts:

1. Random notes or "how-to's" which are about things I myself don't want to forget (but too often do forget). These can be about whatever is bothering, or interesting, or beguiling me on any given day, and my main goal is to capture them in media res and see if they turn up anything more interesting after getting some feedback from readers.

2. Extended series on larger subjects that require orchestration of epiphanies or in any case layers of realization to treat them properly. I would like somehow to make these collaborative journeys with my readers, but in any case they will be written with more care and planning than the posts in the first category.

So anyway, welcome to my blog. I hope you find it interesting, and maybe even edifying.