Common Lisp vs. JRuby

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

JRuby is the effort to recreate the Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org) interpreter in Java. The Java version is tightly integrated with Java to allow both to script any Java class and to embed the interpreter into any Java application. See the docs directory for more information.