Here is my brief review of the articles as a whole. As a little background, I've been writing Lisp professionally for a while at many companies, both start ups and top-tier tech companies.

I like writing about Lisp[1], and have been so far as to write blog posts ranging from why parentheses are a good thing to what kinds of data types Common Lisp has. I think there is still a place for writing about Lisp, but I don't think this e-zine accomplished the task to make it interesting.

Lisp unfortunately attracts a lot of fluff writing. Writing about how wonderful, deep, rich, or sophisticated it is. Writing about how it completely blows one's mind and takes you to this baroque, fluid land of programming literacy. I must admit that I've even been sucked into the vortex at a point in my Lisp career.

Then there are particular topics that get rehashed over and over again: what makes a Lisp? which is the best Lisp? which is the most practical? lisp-1 vs. lisp-2? was r6rs a failure? why are macros so great? why does Lisp subsume every programming language ever?

I found in this e-zine—whose title I can't repeat without bloating the paragraphs I write—that I didn't really gain anything after reading it all. What did I learn about T? I just learned that it was some language with interesting concepts, backed up with a paltry offering of examples. What did I learn about Apple? To me, it seemed like an opinion: Since Apple isn't doing wacky Lisp things, it no longer is catering to those with ideas. (This is something I disagree with.)

Regarding topics, I also found this e-zine to be somewhat haphazard in its arrangement. Maybe it's just the visual layout, but the topics didn't really flow, and it read more like a long blog post with randomly selected topics interjected with philosophical ideas about categorization.

I have a hard time really seeing, after reading, who this e-zine is for. It doesn't seem like it'd interest the general programming enthusiast, because it's just about a class of languages that few people actually use. It constantly shows code and uses jargon that the general programmer probably isn't accustomed with. It barely seems to appeal to veteran Lisp programmers because there's little depth and lots of the aforementioned fluff. The only group I can think it appeals to are people who have casually brushed next to Lisp at a previous time and wish to be re-injected with a shot of apparent beauty and mysticism they once saw, but never had time time or patience to fully reach.

My suggestion for future articles: Instead of trying to talk about all Lisps all the time, and talk about beaten-to-death topics that pop up on Usenet everyday, talk about something more technical and be comprehensive. What is something really interesting about Common Lisp? Though not exactly in the format I'd have for a magazine article, I wrote about "linear random access sequences" in Lisp here:

http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1845

What about an overview of how the object system in T works? How about examples of how Lisp has solved problems in the industry that people don't know about (i.e., people know about ITA, the space probe, Jak & Dexter game, etc. because they're the examples that continue to propagate)?

How about where Lisp falls short? Lisp is a language that was ahead of its time, but there are language features now that seem beyond Lisp's grasp. Where has it failed?

All in all, I was somewhat disappointed, especially given the well qualified and articulate author. I think there's potential, but I don't think Read-Eval-Print-Love has successfully converged to what it should or could be.

I do wish Code Quarterly[2] was successful. Fogus even seemed to contribute to it with an interview with Rich Hickey. But, as outlined here[3], there wasn't enough motivation from the writers to make it successful.

[1] http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?cat=10

[2] http://www.codequarterly.com/

[3] http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/end-of-the-line-...