[eigenspace]

I didn't use Common Lisp for very long, but unbeknownst to me at the time, getting interested in (SB)CL was a bit of a turning point for me from being primarily interested in physics to being interested in programming and software development.

During my physics undergrad, I was pretty uninterested in programming and I was only interested in "pen-and-paper" physics. Numerical solutions weren't very intellectually interesting to me. I knew a bit of Matlab, Python, and Mathematica, but of those languages only Mathematica was remotely intriguing to me, but I ran into some contexts already where all the above languages where just too slow to solve some important problems.

I spent the summer before my Masters degree started trying to decide on what language I should learn and master, I didn't want to have this annoying situation where I had to mix and match between slow expressive languages and fast, clunky languages.

I almost went for Fortran, but then I happened upon some old threads about Common Lisp, and people discussing some concepts I wasn't really familiar with like metaprogramming and I got quite intrigued. Metaprogramming was the first software topic that I found intellectually stimulating in its own right. Before that, programming was just a means to an end for me.

I spent a couple months reading old Common Lisp books and learning to use it, before I then stumbled upon Julia, and found that it had just about everything I was looking for -- an active scientific community, expressiveness, performance, interesting metaprogramming facilities.

At that point, I pretty much stopped all my common lisp usage in favour of Julia, and still heavily use Julia to this day in my job as a software developer, but I credit Common Lisp (and SBCL in particular) with being the thing that actually convinced me that there was something interesting about programming in its own right.