Oh Lisp, why do you hate me?

So, spent most of the day doing AI programming with CLisp (Common Lisp) and it's an absolute bitch. The entire syntactic structure of the language is completely and utterly dependent on a whole ream of brackets thrown in everywhere, which makes reading the code fairly awful. Also, the tiny scraps of documentation that are out there are pretty much just memory-joggers - they're not designed for learning from!

Managed to get something done at least - I've got a program which talks to you, a good data-structure laid out to symbolically encapsulate the features of a film, a database of films to work with (thanks mum!) and the ability for a user to add new films to that database. Unfortunately, I can't get the new films to save across sessions yet though, need to work out how to file-write with lisp first, should be fun fun fun.

Next stage is making the program actually think, so it can recommend films based on criteria given to it, or on a choice of one of the other films it has. I've got my head around the concepts involved, it's just a struggle with lisp now :(