from hell to paradise ; ; ; was: [plt-scheme] Prereqs for robotic programming

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 04:46:05PM -0500, Prabhakar Ragde wrote:
> >>But people are motivated toward pleasure and away from pain, so if 
> >>learning
> >>> FP is going to cause too much pain, it's going to be a non starter.
> >
> >Yes it is painful.
> 
> Says who?
> 
> I wrote my first functional program in my fifth decade of life. And as 
> my sixth approaches, I continue to learn about FP with an underlying 
> fury -- fury that from age 14 to 40+, my teachers, my peers, and my 
> field conspired to hide this natural and elegant way of doing things 
> from me. --PR

I was lucky in that I read McCarthy's paper on Lisp early in the 60's, 
while prowling through the periodicals section of my university library.  
I was so impressed that I wrote away for the Lisp 1.5 programmer's 
manual, and even got a listing of the implementation on the IBM 7090 -- 
lots and lots of assembler.

I then started my own implementation.

-- hendrik