Code Notelets

I've noticed from people's attitudes toward Lisp that many think it is an esoteric and difficult language to learn. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it does depend on what angle you're coming at it from. If you're coming from C, C++, Javascript, or even Python, then yes Lisp does appear impenetrable at first glance. But if you're coming from shell scripting (e.g. Bash or another Linux or Unix shell) - a skill which most programmers have used at some point - then Lisp is going to be very simple and very familiar for you to learn. You may be asking, how is this? Well, I'll demonstrate it with a couple of examples. I'm going to show you a shell command that takes the second column of a space-delimited file test.txt, sorts the resultant data, and shows the second item in the sort. cut -d" " -f2 test.txt | sort | head -2|tail -1 There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this, as you can see. The results of one command are bein...