Around 1995, she was 12, had (still has) a 'Daddy enthusiastic programmer', a lot of school mates eager to 'have the miracle machines doing what THEY wanted, not what somebody else dictated', ... well, I started a mini programming course on Saturday mornings. Basic and Logo, of course. The kids were really bright (at that age!), I had been using Lisp since 1986 for cryptology applications (infinite integers handling, DB-nearly-embedded-into-it), I gave it a try using MuLisp, an outstanding product from The SoftWarehouse in Honolulu. No more of it: four out of five of them after two lessons only bluntly (you are blunt at that age!) stated that anybody using basic instead of Lisp must have 'a few wheels rotating in the wrong direction in his brain'. Two of them, under my diabolic influence, enrolled in C.S. Now I am 63, they are 30, all of us still use Lisp for real s/w development. P.S.1: often we deliver without saying the end user 'what is running under the hood': no complains from him, we are often ahead of schedule, but can you imagine the 'ohhhs and ahhhs' from people who somebody do not even back up data and run sensitive appls w/o a UPS? What comes out better in C/C++, C#, F#, Ruby, J2Me (we are in the embedded business), Forth and the like is of course developed that way. More on the subject of being 'snobbish dvelopers', and for the embedded aficionados: do not be fooled by too many IDEs, store a Forth metacompiler INTO THE VERY POWERFUL MCUs of today's and debug 2x faster than the competition! Bonus: nobody steals your firmware. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everybody. (P.S.2: we are in Italy, not in the Silicon Valley or at Purdue or Carnegie-Mellon or MIT!)
