Lisp - Yet another Lisp Myth debunked (was: Two unrelated remarks)

Author

Yet another Lisp Myth debunked (was: Two unrelated remarks)

Duane Rettig

2004-04-23, 11:52 am

Duane Rettig <duane@franz.com> writes:

> Thomas Schilling <tjs_ng@yahoo.de> writes:

[ ... ]

>
> I started learning Lisp at age 31.

It seems as though this quip to what even I thought was a generally
true statement has caused a flurry of anecdotal evidence to the
contrary. Of course, it is only anecdotal and self-selecting, but
I am surprised by the numbers and especially by individuals whom I
would have thought had started Lisp much earlier in life. Very
interesting.

Perhaps in analyzing the saying "You can't teach an old dog new
tricks", there's an age difference between "an old dog" and
"an old Lisp dog".

--
Duane Rettig duane@franz.com Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/
555 12th St., Suite 1450 http://www.555citycenter.com/
Oakland, Ca. 94607 Phone: (510) 452-2000; Fax: (510) 452-0182

Francis Leboutte

2004-04-27, 3:08 am

Duane Rettig <duane@franz.com> wrote:

>Duane Rettig <duane@franz.com> writes:
>
>
> [ ... ]
>
>
>It seems as though this quip to what even I thought was a generally
>true statement has caused a flurry of anecdotal evidence to the
>contrary. Of course, it is only anecdotal and self-selecting, but
>I am surprised by the numbers and especially by individuals whom I
>would have thought had started Lisp much earlier in life. Very
>interesting.
>
>Perhaps in analyzing the saying "You can't teach an old dog new
>tricks", there's an age difference between "an old dog" and
>"an old Lisp dog".

Hello Anti-Myth,

I know a few other old Lisp dogs, including me. I started at 33.

Francis

Johan Kullstam

2004-04-27, 3:08 am

Francis Leboutte <f.leboutte@algo.be> writes:

> Duane Rettig <duane@franz.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello Anti-Myth,
>
> I know a few other old Lisp dogs, including me. I started at 33.

I think I was 33 as well. I did a lot of computing during the 80s and
learned the popular stuff from that era such as Basic, Pascal, various
flavors of assembler and later, C and Matlab. No one ever talked
about Lisp.

I do recall vaguely some Scientific American articles by Hoffstader
(sp?) describing lisp and thinking it seemed neat, but I had no
computer system accessible at the time.

Emacs and a frustration expressed about the popular languages C, and
especially C++ in the comp.emacs prompted Erik Naggum to suggest
Lisp. I figured it was worth a look and got the aluminium book, the
Graham pair and Norvig PAIP. I still do not do much in Lisp
(mostly I do matlab) but I really found it to be a mind stretcher. I
am now a better programmer in the other languages for it, and I am
also less satisfied with them.

I figure many Lisper come to it when older because it sure doesn't
have much mindshare (although it seems to be doing better than it has
in a long time). From the posts in this newsgroup, a few life-long
learner types searching for something that sucks a little less seem to
keep finding it.

--
Johan KULLSTAM

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