I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not. (with-open-file (file "test.txt" :direction :output) (print "hello" file)) > This might open a file called “te

I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not. (with-open-file (file "test.txt" :direction :output) (print "hello" file)) > This might open a file called “test.txt” and write “hello” into it—or it might reformat your hard drive! How are you to know? Isn't that true when you call any user-defined function in any language? (Well, actually in Haskell I suppose you can tell if it has side-effects, but with "print" you'd expect it to anyway.) > Also, you can't use Lisp in an interactive application, since garbage collection can kick in at any time and stop your program for a couple of seconds at a time. Yeah, garbage collection sucks! Use Java! Or C#! Apparently. > In contrast, Java and C# programs are compiled into efficient bytecode In contrast to what? Compiling Lisp down to machine code? Argh. You'd've thought I'd've learnt not to feed the troll. Sorry.