Choosing a programming language as a competitive tool

[Douglas Alan]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> writes:

> I tried learning Lisp from an essay in Douglas Hofstadter's
> "Metamagical Themas."  I learned to car, cdr and setq, and that was
> about it.  I couldn't see how to apply that to problems I wanted to
> solve (probably because the essays didn't talk about I/O) so I put
> it aside for a while.

Sounds more like a criticism of Computer Science than of Lisp.
Douglas Hofstadter's column was designed to teach you interesting
concepts in Computer Science, rather than how to do anything
practical.  If you'd read a good book on practical programming in Lisp
(I don't know if there are any), then you'd probably feel differently.

> It's the same reason people use MS Windows over Unix, (or
> Unix over VMS for you DEC lovers :)

Windoze over Unix?  Ugh!  Not me.  I can't get anything done with
Windoze, except spend all day rebooting it.

|>oug