I was working on being better with Lisp and learning Ruby at the same time I was working on some of my thesis code. I initially was going to do it in Ruby but found the variants of syntax offputting - I needed to get functionality down, not remember the exact !@# symbol or syntactic construct. Binary bindings proved to be difficult, since there was a 1.8/1.9 split going on; I had to do some jury-rigging with my Mac.

I got tired of the duct-taping and syntax, then rewrote it in Lisp. Almost no problems comparatively. I'm wholly certain if I was a Rubyist coming in, the issues would have been transparent.