How Sussman Achieved Satori

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

>>8
Oh, come on... nobody writes lisp today.
Hi, I can tell you that LISP is still highly relevant.  I wrote a web application in LISP in the 1980's and sold it to Yahoo who then rewrote it in Enterprise-grade Java.  See, proof right there.