Why lisp .

I don’t know Lisp, ever since the middle years of my CS degree. I was forced to learn Scheme in a week, and it didn’t take. I failed miserably. I never understood it, and generated a program that looked to me like a sea of parantheses that did I didn’t know what.

But every once and a while I hear people who seem to be great programmers say that Lisp is the best thing ever. I’ve never heard good reasons why this should be so, but I was sucked into reading about Lisp because of this article Revenge of the Nerds about pointy haired bosses (PHBs) vs. programmers.