Comment by flavio81
8 years ago
>But instead most schools only use Lisp as a vehicle for teaching the basics of recursion and functional programming, rather than as an immediately useful tool, so most students go away
This was my experience too. In university, Lisp seemed like an awkward, limited language for doing some CS algorithms. So i totally overlooked it.
Fast forward 12 years later, reading in depth about Common Lisp and using it as a general purpose programming language, it's totally awesome.
Wanting to optimize my path through school, I asked some senior people if that programming languages course based on Scheme was useful. I was informed that it's a toy language based on Lisp for teaching. I correctly assumed that this is something other than the real Lisp, a legendary language which can't be a toy. It being a university for grown up children and all, I didn't want to have anything to do with toys. The course was a prerequisite for a senior level compiler course, but I talked the prof into letting me skip the prerequisite and go straight to that compiler course.
Man, I sure dodged a bullet there. Some decade later, I got into Lisp in a big way (the real one); the rest is history.