Choosing a programming language as a competitive tool

[Roy Smith]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> wrote:
> So while you say Lisp is easier to learn, I found it easier to
> use Perl to get things done.  Since I learn best by doing
> things and working on projects, that means for me Perl was
> easier to learn

Saying that "lisp is easier to learn than perl", or the other way around, 
is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison.

Certainly, I can teach you all you need to know about the syntax of lisp in 
about 5 minutes; it's not a heck of a lot more than "count up all the ('s, 
and make sure you've got that many )'s on the other side" :-)  Give me 
another hour, and you'll know all there is to know about lisp data 
structures (car and cdr).  Another hour should get you up to speed on 
whatever random collection of flow control your particular flavor of lisp 
supports.

But, that still doesn't teach you how to use lisp.  If you approach it as a 
procedural language, you won't get anywhere.  For all its bizarre syntax,, 
and executable line noise appearance, perl really is very similar to C, 
Pascal, Fortran, Python, etc.  Lisp is a different way of doing things 
entirely.