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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Lisp considered too hard
In-Reply-To: yost@Yost.com's message of 6 Jun 1995 09:38:26 -0700
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In article <3r20a2$mp@Yost.com> yost@Yost.com (Dave Yost) writes:

>Perhaps someone could do a survey people who still remember what they went
>through to transition from C to Lisp and collect a list of things they found
>difficult or hard to get used to.

Or whatever language(s) you knew prior to learning Lisp; some of us still don't
know C well enough to generate it, though we may be able to read it.

By the time I learned Lisp, I had already worked out all the difficulties with
recursion and pointers by (a) having worked with PL/1 area variables and the
like, and (2) having written a recursive-descent compiler for Pascal.  I'd
already been writing 360/370 assembler for years, so had little difficulty with
the SET vs. SETQ concepts; PDP-10 assembler clarified CAR/CDR *implementation*,
but the concepts were already there.

The biggest problem was using Weissman's book, and the McCarthy manual, with a
PDP-10 version of Standard Lisp (before I graduated to MACLISP):  Quoting top-
level forms wasn't necessary in the first Lisp I used (LISP 360).

Actually, the biggest problem was using Weissman's book at all.  All that time
spent on dotted-pair notation, instead of on application of Lisp itself.  It
only stopped being a toy for me when the first edition of Winston & Horn came
into the Math library.

So I don't think the problems are with C vs. Lisp, but with the usual level of
preparation given to programmers with respect to data structures at all.

Just my not so damned humble opinion, of course.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
