A friend of mine was being taught Java in an introductory programming course (although he already knew some BASIC). He was having a lot of trouble, so I introdu

A friend of mine was being taught Java in an introductory programming course (although he already knew some BASIC). He was having a lot of trouble, so I introduced him to Lisp... After touring through some of the more basic features (no macro-writing or call/cc), he responded with, "Whoa... This is so much simpler than Java, it makes so much more sense." My take on that was that the only reason people find Java easier is because it's more similar to other curly-brace languages, the ones they already know. If you take a newcomer to programming, Lisp just may actually be simpler. So the unwashed masses still have some hope.