College was an amazing time. I dove deep into the beautiful theories of computer science, fascinated by how elegant algorithms could be crafted and how systems fundamentally worked. We spent countless hours learning about data structures, operating system principles, and the theoretical underpinnings of databases. One language, in particular, captivated my imagination: Lisp. Its purity, its power, its meta-programming capabilities – it felt like unlocking the true potential of code. I became fluent, even evangelical, about Lisp. Looking back, that might have been my first mistake.
In university, correctness was king. If your code ran and gave the right answer, you were golden. But the real world of software engineering, as I soon discovered, is a vastly different beast. My first job at a large enterprise was… eye-opening. Suddenly, nobody cared about the elegance of my recursive functions or the clever macros I could write in Lisp. They cared about shipping features, meeting deadlines, and maintaining a massive, sprawling codebase written in Java and Python.
My Lisp skills, once my pride and joy, became… a hindrance. I found myself constantly wanting to refactor everything into more “principled” and “Lispy” solutions. I’d see opportunities for elegant abstractions that nobody else seemed to grasp or appreciate. When asked to fix a bug in a Java module, I’d spend hours thinking about how I could rewrite the whole thing in a more functional style, perhaps even dreaming of a Lisp-based microservice.
The problem wasn’t that Lisp was bad, far from it. It had fundamentally reshaped how I thought about programming. It had given me a deep understanding of computation and abstraction that was invaluable. The problem was context. Enterprise software development isn’t about crafting perfect, theoretically sound systems from scratch. It’s about pragmatism, about working with existing systems, often imperfect ones, and about delivering value quickly and reliably.
My colleagues, bless their souls, were patient at first. But soon, the questions started. “Why is this code so… different?” “Can you just make it look more like the rest of the codebase?” “We don’t use macros here, it’s too hard to maintain.” My attempts to introduce more “sophisticated” techniques were met with confusion or outright resistance. I was speaking a different language, not just literally, but metaphorically. I was optimizing for the wrong things. I was trying to build a Formula 1 car when what they needed was a reliable minivan.
The core issue was that my Lisp-centric education had inadvertently created a kind of tunnel vision. I had become so focused on the beauty and power of one particular paradigm that I had neglected the practical, messy, and often less glamorous realities of professional software development. Testability? Maintainability? Deployability? These were secondary concerns in my academic Lisp world, but they were paramount in my new job.
It wasn’t that knowing Lisp made me a worse programmer in some fundamental sense. It made me a programmer who was poorly suited, at least initially, to the specific demands of enterprise software. It skewed my priorities and made it harder for me to adapt to the pragmatic constraints of real-world projects.
Eventually, I learned to adapt. I started to appreciate the value of simplicity, even if it wasn’t always “elegant.” I learned to write Java that was idiomatic and maintainable, even if it lacked the meta-programming magic of Lisp. I even came to see the beauty in well-structured, testable, and deployable code, even if it wasn’t written in my favorite language.
Looking back, I realize that knowing Lisp wasn’t the cause of my early career struggles, but it was definitely a contributing factor. It had shaped my expectations and priorities in a way that was initially detrimental in a very specific professional context. It taught me a valuable, if somewhat painful, lesson: technical brilliance is only truly valuable when it’s applied with pragmatism and an understanding of the real-world constraints you’re operating within. Knowing Lisp didn’t destroy my career, but it certainly took me on a detour, and forced me to learn some hard but ultimately crucial lessons about what it truly means to be a professional software engineer.
