Subject: Re: Difference between LISP and C++ From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 24 Oct 2002 01:08:16 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3244410496454730@naggum.no> * arien <spammers_suck@getlost.invalid> | The syntax is harder to learn. From the sounds of it this isn't | uncommon. I don't mean to say that the syntax is bad, and obviously | Lispers have grown to like it. But for me, it is harder to learn. But it is harder to learn becuase you resist it! We all know this. Yes, it is not uncommon to resist change. Lots of dumb people resist changes of all kinds, whether they will benefit from them or not, in fact more often than not, they resist changes they /will/ benefit greatly from. What is so tragic about people who keep insisting that things are hard to learn is that saying makes it so. Have you ever heard of a person who admits to thinking "I can'to do this!" over and over until he finally succeeded? No? I know I have not. Why not? What is the #1 advice they give to athletes who want to win so badly they are willing to abuse their body to the extreme, to experience more pain than they were ever meant to, to break every reasonable and rational limit to human performance? To get into the winning mindset. Not only /can/ they beat the odds against them, they /have to/. Not that I want you to go overboard and ignore the finely tuned instructions that are embedded in our finely tuned bodies that pain means a mistake, but you should not yield to resistance if you want to succeed. Learning is hard work. Succeeding is hard work. If you only plan to do what you find easy to do in your life, you /will/ go nuts in no time. Boredom kills people, literally. Every bored moment of your life is an experience of what death is like. If it is hard to learn, that means you have to use your brain and concentrate to succeed. This has "good for you" written all over it. If Java was easy to learn, you would go mad if you were to program in it for real. As I have said on several occasions: Life is too long to be good at C++, meaning that if you spent the decade it takes to become good at it, you would have wasted the opportunity to be good at something worth being good at, and you would have to spend the rest of your miserable life programming in C++. Yes, scream. Now, being good at Java takes the average Joe a good while, and he can expect to use it for long enough to both be worth it and to be worth more than the alternatives. But if you found Java easy to learn, you are not the average Joe. Java is not for you. The only things worth becoming good at are things that are hard to learn, but not all things that are hard to learn are worth being good at. The only thing you know is that if it is too easy to learn, it is not worth wasting brain time on it. Quit whining about how hard Common Lisp is to learn. Start whining about how easy Java was and how much you hate wasting your time on the easy stuff: Yell "BOOORING!" at it and "Gimme something my dog can't do!" -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.