defmacro.org has a tutorial with the subject The Nature of Lisp that introduces some concepts of Lisp by building on the more widely known concepts of XML and Ant's usage of it. via John Lam
I really enjoyed reading the tutorial, it takes a different approach that may be more accessible than many others. Since I've been into Lisp (the Emacs dialect, mostly) before, I can't say whether the tutorial can convince a developer to learn Lisp - go and read it to find out.
The story of Ant's inception is a year late, I guess. Given James' take on Ant using XML today[1] he'd probably disagree with the assertion that using XML was one of the reasons for Ant's success. I think it's a question of having an extensible syntax, not of the syntax itself - which makes me happily agree with the tutorial.
One nit:
In Almost
Lisp the author introduces what would be the <macrodef>
task with "If Ant supported ...". I'd probably rewrite the section
with
<macrodef name="Test">
<sequential>
<echo message="Hello World!"/>
</sequential>
</macrodef>
and in fact I've suggested just that via email.
[1] I can't find it online anymore, this seems to be the best alternative