While everything that the author wrote is true, and I will forever love C, sometimes I wonder if I didn't get short changed by never having been taught ANSI Com

While everything that the author wrote is true, and I will forever love C, sometimes I wonder if I didn't get short changed by never having been taught ANSI Common LISP at the university. LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html Functional language? Check. Stateless? Check. Reentrant? Check. Has a compiler which can generate machine code ELF binary executables? Check. That's not to say one shouldn't learn C - after all, C is the contemporary portable assembler. But if one should also learn C, one should learn assembler too, preferably on a processor with an orthogonal instruction set architecture, like a Motorola 68000. Understanding both, we come back to the author's point - without understanding how the machine works, fast, small, efficient and elegant software will remain forever elusive.