I've recently begun learning common lisp and started the effort from the belief that it was a functional language and that learning a functional language would be a good exercise. I've read some comments and articles that state otherwise.

Any opinions?

IMO -

Except at universities where one CIS faculty member is in love with LISP, you will find very little production code written in that language. Unless you want to major in AI systems (there probably are better AI languages) consider learning something else.

If it is purely for fun - go for it.

Hello,

I can agree with Jim.

I used Common Lisp and other dialects, did some projects.
If you need sockets, regexps and other 'modern' stuff you need to choose suitable implementation. I would like to be wrong but probably IMAP or audio/video will be missing.

The language is very cool. But I observed the most beautiful languages tend to have worse libraries. E.g. Perl and Python are on the 'good libraries' side, CL, Ruby are on 'cool languages' side.

Regards,
Miroslaw

Thanks folks. It is an elegant programming language and may become one of my staples. If it's not widely used in production..well, I'm sure the reasons are
conventional rather than pragmatic.

Hi.
Looking at comparisons at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game I would say the reasons are very pragmatic, at least in regard to resource usage -- CPU and memory.

Still, I think almost any language can help you think in ways that are useful in crafting solutions to problems in general. As noted in PBS presentations on the brain, new challenges can help keep your brain "plastic" ... cheers, drl