I love Ruby, but I'm also an advocate of Lisp. Ruby is, currently, more pragmatic and easier to grasp than Lisp (although it has many Lisp and Smalltalk descended features), so I tend to spend more time there. Lisp, however, is experiencing a resurge in popularity and I think Lisp and its descendants are going to become increasingly important over the next ten years. This is amazing considering Lisp is the second oldest high level language in use today (only Fortran is older), having been invented in 1958.

Lisp is something it took me a very long time to understand, but that's because Lisp's concepts are so far removed from the procedural way of programming that it takes a real bending of the mind to 'get into it'. For a start, all Lisp programs are written as parenthesized lists.

Finally someone has written an excellent article called "The Nature Of Lisp". Unlike prior attempts, the author explains Lisp and its concepts using techniques and technologies every programmer can understand. He makes a great comparison between XML and Lisp, explaining that Lisp is somewhat similar to representing source code in an XML tree. Enjoy the journey.. if you're a coder, you'll definitely learn something.

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