Several years ago I decided that I wanted to find a language that was more powerful and elegant then anything I had worked with before. Having read much about the benefits of Lisp from Paul Graham, I obviously wanted to give it a try.
I personally found it more difficult to use and the lack of standardization and libraries made it unusable for me. I gave it several weeks and tried to solve the problems I was having using it, but I finally started looking for something that had the power of Lisp, but better libraries.
I ended up using Erlang (http://erlang.org) and I've never been happier. Lisp was part of the inspiration for the language, but the libraries that Erlang has built in was the real selling point for me. In fact I'm still finding gems of undocumented functions in the source code that take days off of my programming time and I've been programming in it for more then two years now.
So if Lisp isn't want you want, give Erlang a try ...
Armstrong's book is the single best source for documentation about Erlang I have found so far. I consider it a must read for anyone who is going to be looking into using Erlang. I had a beta copy of it about two months before it was published and it helped me tremendously by simplifying some of the design patterns I had constructed myself.
Also, if I had to complain about Erlang at all the documentation is the one thing I would complain about. I find so many useful features by reading the source code (which also makes my own code better by reading other peoples code) that are not documented that I often wonder who is choosing what to document and what not to.
For instance, the to_lower() function to make a string lower case is in the http_util module, instead of the string module. Took me six months to find it and I had written my own in the mean time, theirs is much more efficient, but all but undocumented.
(I'm the author.) Yes, Erlang is where I've gone. I'm still learning, but it hasn't taken long to get me up-and-running more than proficiently, and I'm loving it so far
I personally found it more difficult to use and the lack of standardization and libraries made it unusable for me. I gave it several weeks and tried to solve the problems I was having using it, but I finally started looking for something that had the power of Lisp, but better libraries.
I ended up using Erlang (http://erlang.org) and I've never been happier. Lisp was part of the inspiration for the language, but the libraries that Erlang has built in was the real selling point for me. In fact I'm still finding gems of undocumented functions in the source code that take days off of my programming time and I've been programming in it for more then two years now.
So if Lisp isn't want you want, give Erlang a try ...