Design Patterns in Functional languages. A couple months ago, I asked what Design Patterns would look like in a Scheme.  Ted Leung has the answer, in the form of a presentation by Peter Norvig.  Lots of people talking about functional languages these days: Charles Cook, Chris Double, James Robertson.  Even Sam Gentile's picking up on generative programming.  Something's in the air, for sure. [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog]

Back when I was involved, full-time, in Java development one of my biggest interests was AspectJ (which I notice is now part of the Eclipse project).  We were building a dynamic, adaptive, component framework and I could see that aspects provided for some interesting solutions to thorny problems.  At the time AJ was still beta'ish and the language evolving from release-to-release so I was biding my time.  Then the company went phut!

But in reading the answer above I get a hint about what is drawing me toward Lisp.

If Java had macros ( in the Lisp sense and not C-style macros ), we could integrate AOP in a seamless way, without having to write custom compilers and all the rest of the stuff that the AspectJ guys are doing. And besides, the AspectJ folks are taking all the lessons that they learned doing Meta Object Protocols for Lisp/CLOS and repackaging them as AOP.

I gotta get me a copy of Paul Graham's Lisp book...