djcb comments on Open Thread: March 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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If you want to write UIs, Lisp and friends would probably not be the first choice, but since you mentioned it...
For Lisp, you can of course install Emacs, which (apart from being an editor) is a pretty convenient way to play around with Lisp. Emacs-Lisp may not be a start of the art Lisp implementation, but it is certainly good enough to get started. And because of the full integration with the editor, there is instant-gratification when you can use some Lisp to glue to existing things together into something useful. Emacs is available for just about any self-respecting computer system.
You can also try Scheme (a Lisp dialect); there is the excellent freely available Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which uses Scheme as the vehicle to explain many programming concepts. Guile is nice, free-software implementation.
When you're really into a more mathematical approach, Haskell is pretty nice. For UI stuff, I find it rather painful though (same is true for Lisp and to some extent, Scheme).