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Should I learn C or Lisp?
Lisp programmers are the Jedi of the computer science world. They've been around forever,
they use sharp weapons, AKA parenthesis and ellipses, and they tend to be purists.
They also tend to live like monks. But I also heard is was a superior programming language.
It is only advocated as superior by those Lisp elitists. If someone asks how to do something
in Lisp on an online forum, the Lisp programmer quickly talks about the elegance of lambda
and peanoarthmetic and orders of mathematics instead of a simple how-to explanation.
You're not a fan of Lisp.
It was around when we put men on the Moon, and it is still used on old NASA servers they
haven't upgraded since the Regan era.
I thought Lisp would at least make you really productive.
Given the steep learning curve, it has the opposite effect. Ruby on Rails at least makes
you more efficient.
That's a pretty steep learning curve if Ruby is better, given how many sites moved from
Ruby to Python or C.
C has the advantage of being used everywhere, from server apps to webpages.
I haven't seen it used on web applications.
C# is C on a .NET framework. That's used in place of VB.NET a lot of places.
I've heard there are a lot of versions of C, from C to C++ to C#.
If you learn C, you'll be able to program in all of them with minimal adjustments. Well,
Objective C is a little harder.
Where is Objective C used?
It is used for programming the iPhone.
That's a career path in and of itself.
Learning C is better for your career in general unless you want to be teaching the Latin of
Computer Science.
You mean Lisp?
Yeah, though Fortran and Basic count, too.