I try to teach myself a new programming language in regular intervals of time. Recently, I've read how Lisp and its dialects are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from languages like C/C++, which made me curious enough to know more about it. However, two things are unclear to me, and I'm looking for guidance on them :


Is LISP still practiced/used in todays world, or is it a legacy language like FORTRAN/COBOL ? I mean, apart from maintaining existing code, is it used on new projects at all ?
What is the most widely used dialect ? I came across Scheme and Common Lisp as the 2 most prevalent dialects, and wanted your opinion as to which is the most favored/useful one to learn - and would be immensely gratified if you can suggest any resources for a rank beginner to start from.


While eager to learn a language which is fundamentally different from the procedural languages I'm used to, I don't want to invest undue effort in something if its totally obsolete - I'd still learn it if it was professionally "dead", but only with an academic perspective...

I rather like Scheme, if you want to work with the JVM you should check out Clojure, which is a lisp that is designed to work in the JVM. And yes Lisp is still worth learning to see how powerful such a minimal design can be! The folks who created lisp got some things really right. Its amazing how many of the cool new features of modern languages lisp had in the 1960's!

For an embeded scheme try guile: http://www.gnu.org/s/guile/
