My name is Abishek. I sporadically blog about a bunch of things that amuse or annoy me. In this space, though, I think I'll write up about my adventures with common lisp. I am working on a couple of simple web applications using common lisp and am also trying to use common lisp for some machine learning work. All of these, at the moment, are hobbies and hopefully one of these days, they will become commercially viable.

While python feeds me and pays my bills, common lisp is the muse that intrigues me the most. I use sbcl for the most part. I have tried some clojure, clojurescript, racket among others. For some reason, clojure quickly spirals into something beyond my comprehension. I had the same feeling with haskell. While I can understand some of the concepts, reading up library code to understand more is somewhat far outside my comfort level. Clojurescript is really very cool work but again am not able to scale beyond the examples at this time. I am sure the limitations come from my working with python almost exclusively for the last decade or so and the fact that I did not have formal CS education at any point :-)

For some reason, though, I am able to read common lisp code without getting lost too much. Even if I cannot understand everything at the get-go, I am able to eventually understand how things work. So, common lisp is at that point just outside my comfort zone enough to be difficult but not so far away that I feel lost all the time. I remember reading elsewhere that this is the zone where we can do our best work and grow.

I hope to fill these pages with code samples and descriptive posts on my adventures writing web applications and machine learning models using common lisp.