I heartily recommend this essay http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...

I heartily recommend this essay http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch... , for gems like "Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis."