I totally agree. We learned Miranda, which is similar to Haskell. Had we learned Haskell and the lecturer had pointed us to its FFI (which is a real joy to use,

I totally agree. We learned Miranda, which is similar to Haskell. Had we learned Haskell and the lecturer had pointed us to its FFI (which is a real joy to use, similar in ease-of-use to the lisp FFIs -- much easier than the java JNI [although JNA goes a long way towards alleviating JNI pain]), things probably would have been very different. I mean, the first real programming I did was with logo. Why was it fun? Because the it resulted in pretty pictures and animations. When I started programming pascal, C, and assembler, it was 320x200x256 graphics that made it fun (that and TSRs). Programs need to do something to be exciting. Sorting lists and building trees is certainly interesting, but doesn't inspire that "I need to figure out how they did that" feeling that every programmer my age will have felt when he/she first saw Doom or Wolfenstein, or in my case, Strike Commander.