I programmed digital signal processing algorithms in C in my
previous job and decide to learn C++ to come up to date.

Not such a smart decision. My concentration is not really
solid enough to survive the disruption of the
edit-compile-run cycle; I would have been better off with
something interpreted. My god, the syntax! Do I want & or
&&? Do they bind tighter than = , shit I mean == . Is *
unary prefix or binary infix? How do I know I've got the
right entry in the precedence table? I used to know this
stuff.

I cope as best I can. Object oriented programming has come
in and I need to learn about it if I'm ever to get back to
work. There are references *and* pointers. I struggle with
the "friend" stuff. I slowly start to realise that I am not
the only person with brain damage.

By March 2001 I've had enough and write in my lab notebook

    I've given up trying to learn C++ from Schildt, and now
    I'm learning ANSI Common Lisp from Graham.

What a relief. I only have to remember '(' to start a list,
')' to end a list, and ' ' to separate list items. No
operator precedence. No distinction between statements and
expressions. Both

if(antecedent) consequent; else alternative;

and

(antecedent?consequent:alternative)

are replaced by a single form, simpler than either.

No defensive insertion of extra '{' and '}'
because of the sometimes unexpected consequences of the
rules on where the ';' go.

Integers obey n+1 > n

Memory allocation is automagic.

If I'm having a bad day I can just type some forms in at the
REPL. I can keep in practice and not forget what I'm trying
to learn even if I'm not well enough to code. The REPL can
even function as an artificial friend. We chat about
Lisp. What type is this? What does that do? Are the
structures shared? I need to lie down for half an hour,
don't go away, I'll ask you what you know, apropos strings,
when I get back.

CL is a simple language whose ease of use provides me with
enjoyable occupational therapy for my disabling neurological
condition.

That is my reality. That is how CL looks from my 200 square
meters of the planet. It is a big planet, with plenty of
room for other radically different perspectives. We could
start by noting that CL is only simple in the sense that the
complicated stuff is optional, (if you code in CL-USER you
need never find out whether packages are simple or not) and
follow up with "hello world" in Java, to emphasise the
importance of whether complications are optional or
not. Let's not go there.

I want to come back to Larry Wall's perspective

We can reconcile my perspective on CL with many other
views. A swimming pool has a shallow end and deep end. When
a child first visits the seaside and enjoys playing in the
surf as the tide comes gently in over sun warmed sand he may
declare that he likes this shallow end, it is much more fun
than the shallow end at the pool back home. Clearly one can
compare shallow ends while knowing nothing of the depths.

I hope that Kent will smile on me, splashing happily in the
shallows of CL and not feel that my perspective disparages
his work. He may even be pleased that it has an application
he could never have imagined.

I don't see how to reconcile Larry's perspective with
mine. There is something seriously, desperately wrong
here.

It makes me think about the Treviso Arithmetic of 1478. Over
the course of four or five hundred years decimal arithmetic
moved from being the new fangled thing taught in
universities to being something to be mastered by 11 or 12
in preparation for algebra.

Are we living through a period of extremely rapid change in
which a similar change is compressed into less than a
decade? Perhaps Larry and his audience belong to the
pre-transitional generation for whom recursion is scary and
difficult, while I, with an early start I've not discussed,
belong to the post-transitional generation.