Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file, socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this would necessarily involve a dumbing down. -- VladimirSlepnev

Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think... -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan".

L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus honoré. -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

The only thing a man should ever be 100% convinced of is his own ignorance. -- DJ MacLean

We really have to get over the idea that some stuff is just worth knowing even if you never do anything with it. Human memories happily erase stuff that has no purpose, so why try to fill up children's heads with such stuff? -- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

Attitude is no substitute for competence. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. ~John R. Wooden

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it. ~Washington Irving