In article <·····················@colorado.edu> ·····@tigger.cs.Colorado.EDU (Repenning Alexander) writes:
What do yall mean by "one can learn lisp in one day"? Sure, it's no
big deal to understand the basics of Lisp (e.g., adding some numbers,
defining simple functions, doing simple list manipulation).
I think reasonable measure is "learning enough to write a non-trivial
program of one's own". Note that this contrasts dramatically with the
task you describe below of getting up to speed on a complex, existing
software project.
We got many new people in our group that were familiar with other
programming languages. They really did grasp the essentials in a day.
However, to become fully functional members of our group took them
about a year. Of course, it took them some time to understand our
existing code, and our philosophy of lisp programming etc. But to a
large degree they had to fight with some of the intrinsic complexities
of lisp like eval-whens, read macros, destructive functions, macros,
packages, declarations, defsystems, loop macros, etc.
Of course the fair comparison here would be with the C language itself
plus the macro preprocessor, plus the make facility, etc...