Programming

the true reason C++ always wins
LaurieWired

When I was in school umpteen years ago, I took a course about oddball programming languages. It was kind of like a survey course. We had to write simple programs in half a dozen weird languages. Lisp was one, I think Snobol may have been another. I remember I had a hard time coming to grips with Lisp. What I ended up doing when I was trying to write a program is - I would step through it mentally, paper and pencil.  There were like two operators, one was CAN and the other was, I dunno, CANT, maybe? Doesn't matter, what did matter was how many arguments there were. If there was only one argument, they did one thing, if there was more than one, they did something else, so in my head, I treated these operators as if statements. By walking through all the possibilities I could see what was going to happen and what went wrong and fix the problem. Seemed like a lot of extra mental effort for not much gain. Just use a normal language that has if statements so you can see the possibilities.

I suppose if you had immersed yourself in the Lisp religion you might learn to think in terms of CAN and CANT, but I wasn't having it.

P. S. The two Lisp operators are CONS and CAR