I thought this post was information-dense to the point of being poetic. (1) I wasn't around in the early 80's so I appreciate insight into what hacking was lik

I thought this post was information-dense to the point of being poetic. (1) I wasn't around in the early 80's so I appreciate insight into what hacking was like back then. (2) It's interesting how something as great as hacking really could be made ridiculous by those Principles that he cited, and that self-important educators did those kind of things, and I wonder if that happens a lot today. (3) It's also true that hackers like getting close to the metal and having control over their machine, to the point of making disk actuators spin or indicator lights blink, etc. Surely it is right to lament the seldomness with which such things concern us today? (4) I thought it was funny that ugly, all-caps names like MEMQ and ASSQ, were NOT the things that he complained about, since as an assembly programmer he wouldn't even notice. Nomenclatural conventions is a microcosm of hacking. The things people say about how names should be -- short, long, structured, typographically this way or that -- these are analogous to what people say hacking should be. It is telling that early lispers didn't give a shit about names that looked like opcodes. (5) As profound as Lisp was, it probably did suffer from being taught by the same guys that came up with those Principles. Like Chaucer urged before, let us separate the wheat from the chaff.