Honestly, it did not even cross my mind that you would need to do any sophisticated programming. I assumed that most of the challenge would be in mapping and m

Honestly, it did not even cross my mind that you would need to do any sophisticated programming. I assumed that most of the challenge would be in mapping and mastering the problem domain: figuring out what problems you need to solve, researching existing solutions to each problem, finding code and adapting it for your needs, experimenting to see if the existing solutions work well for your particular problems, adapting them if necessary, and then wiring it all together in a simple way using a glue language. Lots of work and sophisticated AI stuff there (probably a few PhDs if you took it far enough) but no fancy programming. That seems to be the sad truth about real world problems: the programming is rarely as hard and interesting as all the other problems you will solve. On the other hand, Lisp is a lot of fun, and you shouldn't pass up any excuse to learn it ;-)