I taught the basics of Lisp to a buddy in a single long day. She was a
non-college non-tech with no programming experience. We used Scheme. We got
as far as normal-form evaluation and the scoping rules, and concentrated almost
entirely on functions, lists, symbols, and numbers (which were the footing for
many of the examples). I didn't get ambitious and try to make a data
structures or algorithms course out of it. I was satisfied that she was able
to produce things like
(define (quadratic +- A B C)
(/ (+- (- B) (sqrt (- (* B B) (* 4 A C))))
(* 2 A)))
and
(define (our-copy L)
(if (null? L)
L
(cons (car L) (copy (cdr L)))))
and completely trace a call to it, unaided. She surprised me by grasping
recursion fairly quickly. The next day she taught me some funky blues on the
guitar. She did better with the Lisp than I did with the blues. I got 'em in
my heart but my snausage fingers won't play 'em sweet.
Regards, [Ag]