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.

>>7
Oh, come on... nobody writes lisp today. Focus on C and Assembly if you work at low level, on Java, Javascript and Python if you work at high level. Focus on the UNIX.

Don't waste your time and resources in learning a dead language like lisp. The functional paradigm is dead. You can find it only in the academic context, where you will not program.