[Pdx-pm] Lisp class

[Eric Wilhelm]

# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Randall Lucas
# on Saturday 30 April 2005 11:44 am:

>I will soon have surpassed that age at which Paul Graham asserts one
>must have learned Common Lisp or have missed one's chance.

While I find his ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to his 
newsletter, he also asserts that python is more like lisp than Perl.  
Do you find yourself wanting to learn python?

While lisp has a very sexy, mysterious allure about it, I'm not really 
turned on by the claim that:  "You could translate simple Lisp programs 
into Python line for line."   That says to me that lisp has too many 
lines.

Admittedly, I don't really know lisp, but I've seen people who sing its 
praises knock perl in favor of python while demonstrating that they 
don't really know perl, so I feel pretty comfortable out on this 
ledge :-)

IMO, you should first master map(), then consider learning lisp.  In the 
bit of reading that I've done on it (thinking I was missing out on 
something), I was continually waiting to be shown something that I 
don't already do with Perl on a regular basis.  If there is something 
in there, I doubt if it's anything that you'll get from a class (maybe 
a mentor, but not a class.)

--Eric
-- 
"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother 
me, it's the parts that I do understand." 
                                               -- Mark Twain
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