AA, BB, CC, and DD

I am not making it up. Those were the datanames in the code I had inherited from the Wunderkind. So this will be the most boring stating the obvious war story I ever write but that is not why I am writing it. I am writing it because the Lisp subset of the human race is at it again running factual red lights with their prior conviction feet to the pedal.

Yes, kiddies, we revisit today The Unbearable Impenetrability of the Lisper. The cool thing being that Arc is again involved albeit peripherally in this latest train wreck of human comprehension.

Back then the Maddening Crowd was utterly fascinated that I liked Arc which I did not but they were not to be denied, the best part being those people who responded to my objection to the crowd's misperception by saying yeah I saw you were flabbergasted by everyone thinking you liked Arc so tell me, you like Arc? 

No I am not making that up. Twice. 

This time it was my scrimshaw-ready datanames, sample below. Some months after my exploration of Arc I had a laugh as I whipped up a DSL for my Algebra software and found myself approaching Arcitude in the brevity of my names.  I posted something to comp.lang.lisp inadvertently loosing The Hounds of Lisp Density. A sample:

(hard

    (dsb (b x) (rp 2 (rv))

      (m/ (m^ b (m* (r2 7) x))(m^ (xqv b) (xqv x))))

    (dsb (b x) (rp 2 (rv))

      (m* (m^ b (ms* (r+ 7) x))(m^ (xqv b) (ms* (r+ 3) (xqv x)))))

    (dsb (b x) (rp 2 (rv))

      (m*eo (ms^ b (r+ 7))

        (m^ (xqv b) (ms* (r+ 3) (xqv x)))))

    (dsb (b x) (rp 2 (rv))

      (m/eo (ms^ b (r+ 7))

        (m^ (xqv b) (ms* (r+ 3) (xqv x)))))

    (dsb (n d) (rv 2)

      (w (k (r+ 12))

        (m/ (m^ k n) (m^ k d))))

• dsb is short for the Lisp destructuring-bind.
  
• m/ is short for make-fraction.
  
• m*eo is short for make-product reordering the factors randomly (either-order)
• etc etc

I gave a tip of the hat to Arc and explained that I had done this before (in C) and that this code (to generate randomly many varieties of Algebra problems) was a known PITA and even in C I had used the C preprocessor to likewise make the coding manageable.

Enter the Savages of Comp.lang.lisp.To a geek they lectured me on the importance of nice long meaningful names, or as His Sulzberbergerness edified me a ways back what Confucius called The Rectification of Names which is not quite the same thing but I can never resist name-dropping either Jay or Confucius. 

I responded to the jackals nipping at my heels that yeah I know but in this case with vast incessant repetition of a small collection of opcodes that recognition would not be an issue and that it was much better to diminish the low information content (cue Shannon) of long names (what exactly does make-product add to m* in a context where a leading m is used only for makers?)  and learn a dozen opcodes which were mnemonically and predictably built anyway from atoms such as M and * and EO.

The universal response was that longer names were better. My universal response was that these special circumstances flipped the arrow on that otherwise sage rule.

The universal response was that longer names were better.

Trying again, my universal response was that I agreed, but would anyone like to address the salience of the special circumstances I had suggested were germaine, perhaps explaining how they were not special enough or too special or the wrong damn color?

They all responded that longer names were better and I really started to enjoy things at that point. I was reminded of this desert spider that had a routine for burying any captured wasp and it involved positoning the wasp up just so and then going to dig a hole and then dragging in the dead wasp and these researchers would move the wasp a little while the spider was digging so the spider would be thrown off and start again by repositioning the wasp and no matter how many times they moved the wasp while the spider was digging the spider would just start right over readjusting the wasp and then digging the hole. 

The topper was I myself was a staunch proponent of good long names. Tilton's Law of Programming:

 Spend more time on the names you choose than on the algorithm.

 As for the specific quality of length, we have Tilton's Rule of Abbreviation:

Abbreviate no name less than seven characters long and then only if a good abbreviation is no more than half as long. Rounding down.

Which brings us to AA, BB, CC, and DD. I was working as a body shop consultant in easily my most Tall Building job ever. One day this new guy came on board, totally not GQ, scrawny, smart, energetic. I had no idea he was a first round draft pick, destined for greatness. An employee, by the way. Tom. He dives in and starts churning out a front-end application, learning the HLL and OS and tools all at once, a man after my heart. 

At one point he mentions to me a problem. He wants users to be able to make discontinuous menu jumps, say, go sideways without backing up to the menu above (yeah, this was the good old days of modal interfaces) and the programming language would not go sideways. ie, He was using HLL recursion to handle nested menus.

I suggested the obvious: no, you cannot call sideways in a structured language, you have to return from the called function with a "message" always checked by the caller to see if the user should be taken somewhere else. Tom yelled Great! and tore off to code it up.

A couple of weeks later I have inherited the system. Tom was smarter than I: as soon as he had chalked up the win he told his boss to "get some consultant" to maintain it. Moi. So there I am working on the first RFE and I am perusing the code trying to figure out how the hell it works and I find myself slowed a bit by the data names that pretty much controlled everything: AA, BB, CC, and DD.  Come on, you think I could make up names that bad?

So over I wander to Tom's desk, clear my throat, Tom looks up.

"Tom," I said. "I was looking at the code. AA? BB? CC? DD?"

Tom burst out laughing.

"Those are just temporary variables!" he protested, laughing even more.

"Un-hunh," I replied. "And they control the entire program flow."

"Well, change them if you like."

As I said, Tom was a smart cookie, he was wiping his hands of the whole deal.

Now it turns out that one of the things I like to do when working on OPC (Other People's Code) is to stare at it and stare at it and when I see some crucial variable playing a big part in things and its name is getting in my way I pick a better name and do a global change, rinse, repeat until the damn code makes sense. The only reason I had gone to talk to Tom was the same reason we pay to see a two-headed sheep at the carnival.

Two hours into the renaming I had come up with decent names for AA, BB, CC, and DD (that last  one turned out to be three different variables) and I was making the global changes eyeballing each as I stepped through the source and after one such change forgive me I will never in my life remember the specifics but imagine you have just made the substitution and are now looking at a line of code that says:

  total-weight = total-weight + this-length

I did not feel completely comfortable with that edit so I called Tom over. Did I mention he was a smart guy? Two seconds into explaining how I had gotten to that point he yells out, "Great! I gave up on finding that bug!"

Smart guy. Tough bug? He just moved on and chalked up the win. Let some consultant take over the code and run into the bug and think they introduced it.

But there you have it. A bug so hard to find that a very smart programmer gave up on finding it and someone who did not even know the bug existed changed a few datanames and the bug positively jumped off the page. Explaining the corollary to Tilton's Law: 

If the names are right the algorithm will write itself.

Now if only some walking fencepost from c.l.l will post a comment saying... well, that would ruin it, would it not?

Now Batting, Dave. Why is Mariano Rivera not worried?

The venerable Mr. Roberts draws on his profound mastery of things algorithmic as he intones:

I'm actually quite conscious of cons-ing, but I also believe that obsessing about cons-ing leads to premature optimization and far greater numbers of bugs. 

We are fortunate to have the benefit of his wisdom and it occurs to me that we can keep talking past each other enjoyably for weeks like this so i will not suggest we try to establish a concrete example where he would code append and I would code nconc and ruin all the fun. But it is a good question especially if we agree (we do) that as a rule the functional paradigm utterly Rocks the Casbah so how on earth am I going to get a list back from some function I call and not be free to nconc it? The moral being I am right (will it never end?): if we try to find a point of Actual Disagreement(tm) we will fail so let us not.

Getting back to the fun abstract theoretical conflict, the problem is a policy of copying which leads straight to the solar power objection aka death by a thousand cuts which in turn leads us back to the simple question of why we do not just code the right operator at every turn? Genius is in the details which means we are always on our game bringing me to Mariano Rivera.

For those who do not know Mariano plays baseball and is starting to be called the best ever at his position, namely "closer" which means we won the first eight innings and do not want to lose the game please do the rest and he does. Even in the seventh game of the World Series that he lost every hitter broke their bat but the three balls involved known in the game rather morbidly as "dying quails" found their way to the grass. Hard to feel bad about shattering three bats. I digress, Mo is good.

Genius. Details. The great Nconc vs Append War, Roberts-Tilton III, nothing like this since Ali-Frazier, Affirmed and Alydar.

It was Just Another Game. The Yanks had won, Mo had saved. They always collar some poor sod and keep him from his shower and car service home to make those of us who pay to watch baseball on cable TV feel better and tonight poor Mariano's number (42!) came up and by the grace of God I pulled my face out of a carton of cold noodles with seame sauce just in time to witness a perfect moment in sports broadcasting and as well a master class in excellence any time any where.

The announcer on the field for the interview went for a home run question, something way more astute than the usual "How did it feel getting the big out?" and he came up with a beaut: 

"Billy Bob is a rookie and you have never faced him before, there must not be much of a book on him," the announcer observed. "Was it tougher facing an unknown quantity?". 

"No," Mariano replied. "I went out during batting practice to watch him hit."

Mariano's disclosure that as a Hall of Fame shoe-in and multi-millionaire perennial All-Star participant he had looked down at the lineup and seen an unfamiliar name and broken off his clubhouse routine to go watch some ridiculous kid take batting practice had no small effect on our seasoned, professional, expert baseball announcer:

"You did that?!!!!!!". He blurted out, hopping a little in the air, lurching towards Mariano. "You went out to watch him take batting practice?!!"

Now it was Mariano's turn to be amazed, leaning back a little to create a margin of safety.

"Of course," he replied. "I get paid a lot of money."

Doodleoodleoodleoodleoodleoooo. Game over. The announcer (and I, I confess) had been seriously schooled. 

We sit at home and watch these athletes precisely because what they do is so wonderful to us and we endow them in our minds with magical and wonderful qualities because at an early age we were robbed of angels and dragons and Santa Claus and even monsters in the closet and trolls beneath the bridge and then every once in a while we learn that the miracle strikeout we saw with the bases loaded happened because a multi-millionaire punched the time clock, checked his glove for broken laces, sharpened his spikes, and checked the opposing team's roster for any names he did not know.

I say learn the damn language.

Fear No Evil II, or Why Solar Power Sucks

Just a quick note cuz I remembered something that answers Dave's well-reasoned comment:

My own personal rule on this is to use functional programming whenever possible and let the GC deal with it. 

Not much of an excerpt, but it says it all: modern Lisp GCs truly Rock the Casbah, and I myself am on record as denouncing the flipside of this blogcoin, consophobia. Actually, there may be a problem, Dave says "whenever" possible and perhaps then we agree! 

But "whenever possible" has a ring to it like "oh, you know, all the time" and I actually had a good reason for not doing that, I just forgot it. Has to do with solar power. 

The reason solar power sucks even though there is an overwhelming amount of it is that it is diffuse. Yes, enough sunlight falls on Kansas in a month (I am making this up) to power Earth for a year, but just try to find a solar panel as big as Kansas, never mind deal with the Kansans or the inefficiency of the transmission to Australia. I digress.

The problem with a "Damn the consing! Full molasses ahead!" policy is that when ones application drags to a halt there will not be a bottleneck to fix. There will just be hundreds of places one was too lazy to think about whether one could use the right construct. And correcting them all will be as painful, tedious, dreary, mind-numbing (sound like fun yet?) and thus as bug prone as it would be easy and fun whenever reaching for a list manipulation tool to challenge oneself with, gee, can I cut in the afterburner? Stand back, GC! Captain Destructo is in da house!

That is a practical objection. My ethical objection (viz, hey, learn the language) is not all that far behind: jeez, I am building this list right here in front of my eyes, why am I not using a destructive operation for the next step? Do these same folks all have a copy-n-sort function in their personal toolkits that begins with a copy-list on the sequence to be sorted? 

No, they do not. Why not? Hello.

My apps periodically get bogged down. I wait until they do and then dive in for what I like to call Speed Week after a regular TV extravaganza on vehicular racing. Normally this turns up interesting algorithmic gaffes I do not feel too bad about but one time the smoking gun was the most innocuous little needlessly copying statement you can imagine write at the center of the heaviest hitter bit of code you can imagine. This is pretty much the opposite of the solar power argument -- there was just one little guy to track down -- but without the code profiler offered by AllegroC I am not sure how long it would have taken to find that. 

And now I come back to the main point: er, exactly how hard is it to know when one can use destructive list operations?  So why not use them? Only one excuse comes to mind (fear) but always copying is not even a clear win (ie, it can totally suck at times) so.... learn the language?

If I was going to cut the Copying Cowards some slack I would say, shucks, not everybody writes insanely intense tight loops. But then I remember a point I made in FNO/1: we get noobs all the time struggling with slow code because of excess copying. Perhaps complex applications and tight loops are orthogonal?

I say learn the damn language.

Chomsky! Pinker! Get In Here!

[OK, OK, it is a Lisp blog but if I can refute Chomsky's entire body of work on language acquisition in one post, why not?]

These academic PhD geniuses have a problem. They are geniuses. They think they can figure everything out by thinking, like Feynman fixing the neighbor's radio at the age of three or something close to that by thinking. Great story, buy the book. Forget which.

Chomsky and Pinker merely repeat the error of the AI crowd who sniffed at NI (I just made that up, it means "natural intelligence") and said, "NI?! NI?! We don't need no stinkin NI!". They said that because they were geniuses they knew that what NI did with pretty much organic chemistry they could stomp with (drum roll, please) reason.  Ooooohhhh, excuuuuse me!

I guess I can leave Pinker out of this, he did not add anything to Chomsky, he got drugged in only because a correspondent mentioned his "work" on blank slates. I love that "work": Oh, let me lean back and draw on my pipe and I have a PhD so if I think babies learn something too fast they learn them too fast, dammit! As if. And believe it or not I am coming to my point. But first a science trick, a prelude to my witnessing of the refutation of Chomsky. It has no bearing on anything else but it involves a cute girl and something I could not believe when I saw.

There I am in a sports bar/shore bar celebrating a great week almost delivering my world-changing Algebra software when I see a lovely lass drop her drink. Three or four feet, to the floor. It was a plastic cup, which helped a lot come to think of it, because a glass glass being more rigid would not have absorbed the energy and there would have been a wicked rebound preventing what happened from happening: the drink landed upside down and just stood there, trapping half the drink inside. The bad news being there was no elegant way of finishing said drink, but that is not my point. Did I have a point?

Well, if I had to have a point, it would be that no one else was all that impressed. Clearly I need to spend more time in bars late at night watching drinks being dropped and I do not think it is possible to spend more time in bars late at night than do I so I guess I need to find bars with clumsier people, good luck on that.

Oh, and the other useless and irrelevant to the demolition of Chomsky/Pinker thing I learned is that it takes just one unauthorized speech on world affairs (well, he was mumbling pretty badly, I am not sure it was on world affairs) over the unattended band microphone to get escorted unceremoniously out the front door at the sports bar in question. Right, Chomsky.

So I look up and I see a skateboard competition, lucky enough to be watching the winner's winning run, and lucky enough for my brain to clear long enough to understand what I am seeing, a Johnsonian kicking of the rock I refute you thus Dr Berkeley of Chomsky/Pinker by some sixteen year-old if that. What did he do, and why did my brain have to clear? Two good questions.

What he did was give himself a push across a flat floor in a reasonably small room (no gigantic ramps and concomitant acceleration/stored momentum) and upon reaching a ramp at the same time push off in such a way that the skateboard (unattached to his feet for those who do not know) elevated with him to a height just above a rail (er, just an elevated horizontal pipe mebbe a foot off the floor) such that he could land on the skateboard in midair just as the tip of the skateboard landed on the rail and using his/their forward momentum proceed to slide along the rail for a couple of yards before again levitating off to land somewhere else to commence another trick. 

And before the anti-blank-slate morons can scream "Oh that is easy, I have the algorithm right here" allow me to break their hearts and add that as he did the initial elevation springing the board into the air with him (a yawner in these competitons) he took the trouble to pop his deck into a barrel roll (or two, who knows at that speed?) before regaining it to land the rail toe-slide. If the MIT geniuses think that is easy lemme just say that I have spent years in Central Park watching the same people practice on skateboards for years and they still cannot jump over a small backback and land on the skateboard on the other side.

So... these people have skateboard organs? Or do you think learning to barrel-roll a jump into a rail toe-slide is more important to them than is mastering language to an infant so their motivation is stronger? This would be a reasonable belief if one has never been in the presence of an infant who will join in any conversation it hears when it neither understands nor can generate one intelligible syllable.

Oh, and why did my brain have to clear? Because what I saw was a commonplace: inconceivable performance easily explained by sufficient practice. If a recent blog had not been on my mind I would not have given the skateboard performance a second thought, nor the motorcycle-flipping organ manifested in the next story on ESPN.

Come to think of it, this is about why Lisp wins: we simply are not as smart as we think we are. I like to say that I cannot write good code but I do know when I have written crappy code. Recognizing is easier than generating. Hell, crappy is just one bit, right? But how do we produce a huge stream of uncrappy bits? Good luck.

What we want then is an agile language that lets us create awful code really fast and fix it as fast as we identify the problems. Pretty soon our software organs cut in and we are creating not-so-awful code up front. Even better.

Now I just have to figure out an elegant way to finish a drink upside down on a barroom floor.

Buzz off, Charlotte

Omigod. I just made up that title because of the subject of this post and not five minutes ago I ended up daydreaming about a girlfriend I had back in college named Charlotte and as you will see there is no connection. Scary.

Anyway, it is 2:38 am and I am in the middle of a trivial but unwelcome re-de-refactoring with a scant few days to go before a self-imposed but jeez I gotta get this frickin thing out the door it is the middle of July deadline and it is an educational app  and how far is it from the middle of July to frickin September?!!!!!!! I digress. 

It is 2:38 am and a spider I swear to god no more than 2mm across is dangling in front of my flat planel trying to figure out this code (the last bit of the last line, to be precise):

(defun alert (s oks)

      (tk-format-now (conc$ "tk_dialog .oops {} {"

                   (format nil "I thought you were solving for \"~c\"? I do not see it."

                            (key-char sfvar))

                   (format nil "} {} {~s} {~s}" oks oks))))

Charlotte (look it up furriners, E B White) is freaking out over the double occurrence of the variable OKS. I know because the little hussy has lowered herself I swear to God ten feet from the A-frame ceiling of my ranch rental all the way down to within a foot of my desktop and stopped. How still is the air in here? She was swaying no more than another 2mm.  I digress. But how does a 2mm spider pack ten feet of gossamer into its, well, gossamer pack?! I don't care how thin it is, it is stll ten feet!

Charlotte was both deeply concerned and a sufferer of tunnel vision. She ascended to the top of the flat panel (I have it angled down to my slouched position a few inches above desktop), gained a foothold or five, and then inched...no, mmed over and redescended to get a better look at the first occurrence of OKS, just to be sure. It is possible she then pirouetted on her thread to ask why I did not check the CLHS on FORMAT to find out how to back up one argument and re-use it, but I cannot be sure. If my eyes were better, I could tell you. 

Well, I am in a hurry dammit and you know what I think I have the strength to type oks a second time and no I do not think the redundancy will lead to the loss of a satellite but if a damn spider complains I know enough to listen... ah, there it is ~:*, back up one arg.

Now buzz off, Ch... hey, where'd she go?

It's the shoes, Jeff! It's the shoes!

My buddy Jeff wondered aloud on comp.lang.lisp why We Lisp Gods were so much better than the rest of you at adapting to alien environments, aka other languages. Without coming down in favor of any, he offered several possible explanations:

1. We are just smarter than you un-Lisping dopes
   
2. We are accustomed to learning other languages because the food is OK in soup kitchens but the decor? Omigod!
   
3. We are older and you can't teach an old dog new... hang on.

Based on recent copious experience, you can safely forget #1. Lispers are precisely as dense as other programmers, and if anything more so: as the title suggests, we are being carried by the shoes. Anyone both smart and using Lisp is named Graham or Morris and either has or split over forty big ones, and no, a thousand smackolas is not "big".

#2 is a fine answer but is boring and knocks the legs out the upcoming argument so let us declare it false. That was easy

#3 is part #2 and part what I joked: old may be wise but it sure ain't adaptable, it already knows The Right Way, it aint listenin.

That leaves the title of this entry, a reference to one (or more?) humorous Spike Lee ads for Nike sneakers in which he insists the sneakers explain Michael Jordan's Unbearable Lightness, to which we see his Airness reacting with feet-on-ground dubiosity. IIRC, but I think I do.

But in this case, I think for once Chomsky might find a home. Chomsky decided that because he Chomsky could not understand how infants picked up language that there must be a magical device at play, a language organ in the brain dedicated to language acquisiton just as the spleen is dedicated to damn I wish I had not slept through biology.

Chomsky had a tiny little problem with his nonsense in that when one looks at human languages -- any of which can be picked up by any infant raised in its midst, whatever that infant's genetic tree -- well, the structural variation is infinite. I remember one universality they found: adjectives tend to appear very close to the nouns modified. Well, shazaam!

So the Chomsker has a problem: this super-duper language organ has to be hardwired not to learn any particular syntax, it has to be hardwired to learn every syntax. Ok, that makes no sense, shall we try again?........... um............. er....................... I got it! It is hard wired to learn an abstract syntax! If only we could find one!!! Chomsky failed except for that bit about modifiers miraculously always appearing close in sentences to the thing being modified.  Yeah, how come no language ever came up with "The little giant slowly balloon over drifted the mansion red white."? Because the language organ rejected all those! Where was I?

Ah, flexible language acquisition, computer or otherwise. No, it is not the brain, it is the shoes. Basketball no, programming yes. No, Michael did not reach new heights because his sneakers opened new doors for him, but yes: expose someone to Lisp and (as many before me have observed) they become a better programmer.

Chomsky saw the infinite variability of actual syntaxes as a severe objection to his hypothesis, and he was right to do so. Indeed, look at it from the other direction and we see the light: forget infants' ease of language acquisition, look at the difference between those who know one language and those who know five. Something happens after one has learned a bunch of languages -- acquisition of the next becomes a snap. No, I do not have that backwards. There is a small effect of "hey, anyone who has learned five just digs languages and does because they are easy for them", but I learn natural languages insanely easy and get a huge kick out of stumbling thru a conversation in French or Mandarin and learning a new language is still hard for me because circumstances never led me to learn more than what I needed to get out of high school. 

No, what is going on is the same as any learning process: the more we do the more the brain wires up metaskill at that activity. Babies are not born with a language organ, they just happen to have nice blank slates and speech is to them obviously something utterly compelling to master, it seems to control these big creatures moving about before them. Nothing like insane motivation for apt learning, eh Dr. Chomsky? But later on in life when a second language is an amusement? Acquisition is brutal. Where's the language organ now? Withered? Why does it come back after I have learned four the hard way? Ooops.

Was I supposed to be answering Jeff's question? My bad. Chomsky was wrong, McCarthy was right: a language in which code can be data and verse visa is one in which the programmer is stripped of structure and stricture and as Sartre warned us is not free to be not free. In mastering any art true freedom comes only within the constraints of the form, but Lisp offers us no such handholding. Some brilliant wag once observed that Lisp gives us a million ways to do anything but (1- million) of them are wrong -- a working Lisper like one who has learned the hard way five natural languages learns a metalanguage of programming that would delight and disappoint Chomsky, because the learned metalanguage is just one more demonstration of the brain's ability to find patterns in whatever it is immersed in long enough. ie, Organ, schmorgan, neural nets simply rock.

Lispers are not smarter, they just fell into a pool and learned to swim -- ah, good analogy, nothing to hold them up, had to make do in a medium that would not support them, they had to add energy to the system to stay afloat, something like that. Lisp not only supports every paradigm, worse, it even allows any paradigm you can invent one as I thought I did with Cells until I looked up the prior art, but that does not change the fact that while working on a little GUI geometry problem a new paradigm jumped into my code... deal with this kind of language and... well, imagine sneakers that really did have wings. Wear those for a year and then climb back into ordinary sneakers...I'll give you a minute to think. What happens?

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Disappointment? Some. Depression? No. End of flying? Never. You have tasted flight, you know what is possible, and you want to be there again. Now the analogy breaks down, because guess what? Lisp is just another language. When you do not have it, you can Greenspun it. When subjected to a toad of a language you grouse for fun but you also have code to write and you shrug off the downgrade and fly with the sneakers you have. 

In my first programming job I astounded the team so badly they kinda fired me, gave me only the maximum raise and blew me off when I asked for more because in nine months I had finished every system they had in development. At my going away they said they did not go out on a limb for me to exceed the maximum because they knew I would be leaving anyway. They did not know how much I loved the company bowling league or softball beer league. What was my secret in this Cobol shop? I had been programming in Basic on an Apple II. 

One day I came upon a senior guy (OK,they were all senior, I had been there three months at the time) staring at my code as he tried cloning it to his assigned, well, clone. Concerned, I paused and asked if there was a problem. He waved me away, saying, No, I just have never seen Cobol like this. I understood. I knew even as I did it that I had been programming Cobol in Basic. I think I have that backwards. I remember asking them -- I was just learning Cobol at the time -- if a subscripted variable could be a subscript and I remember a very nice twenty-year Cobol veteran asking me very gently if I might not be making things a little too complicated. Nah, just trying to do Basic in these Cobol sneakers.

Lisp then is a substitute in itself for learning five natural languages, because it itself is not Chomsky's language organ, it is the universal syntax Chomsky had to identify for his imagined language organ to have been hardwired to learn. Lisp is the programming language embodiment of Sartre's curse: we are not free to be not free. Program this language and one will first use the wrong language feature at the wrong time (hang out on comp.lang.lisp to witness the hijinx of Lisp noobs trying to do things "The Lisp Way") and eventually get to the point where one can look at problems and see the paradigms they bring with them aided always by your language which is being utterly useless at telling you what paradigm to use, it could care less. 

ie, It's the shoes.