Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

This article, like every other Lisp article, tells pre-teen me nothing that he could use. Nobody ever demonstrated how much easier task X is in Lisp over asm/C/Pascal/etc.

By contrast, current me could have told pre-teen me "Hey, that spell checker that took you 7 months to write in assembly? Yeah, it's damn near trivial in Lisp on a microcomputer with bank switched memory that nobody every knew how to utilize (it makes garbage collection completely deterministic even on a woefully underpowered CPU). Watch."

I want to weep over the time I wasted doing programming with the equivalent of tweezers, rice grains and glue because every Lisp article and textbook repeated the same worn out lists, recursion and AI crap without ever demonstrating how to do anything useful.

I did have a copy of "LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" by Touretzky in 1986. It wasn't really that much better than any of the articles. It never explained why using Lisp would be so much easier than anything else even for simple programming tasks.

Had some of the Lisp hackers deigned to do stuff on the piddly little micros and write it up, things would look a whole lot different today.

Maybe there was a magazine somewhere doing cool stuff with Lisp on micros in the 1980-1988 time frame, but I never found it.