In the final year of my degree, I had to complete a major piece of work; a kind of dissertation equivalent for the illiteratti of Computer Science. I chose to implement a neural network [ this originally said “semantic network” but that was Freudian slippage. ] My project supervisor, a PhD researcher, suggested that I use Lisp with a library for fuzzy logic.
We didn’t have The Interwebs in those days, so I went to a book shop to order a Lisp book, well, THE only Lisp book, which I had to order from the US:
(LISP 1.5 PRIMER (BY (CLARK WEISSMANN)))
Do you see what he did there, apart from the obvious shouting? All computers shouted, in those days.
It mostly went wrong from there on. My mate Mark wrote a comparison between Algol 68 which we’d been taught and BCPL, the forerunner of C; another block-structured imperative language but typeless. I had chosen to do something difficult in a language I knew nothing about. I tend to take the path less travelled, but Mark’s path led to a doctorate. “That’ll learn him”, as Badger would say.
I learned that it is easy to be taught a computer language by someone who knows how (if you think in the right way) and it’s quite easy to move to a slightly different language. I’ve done it several times, but Lisp has a completely different computing paradigm and the book didn’t arrive in time. I was beaten by Lisp once but I didn’t feel it was a fair fight. I arrived back at the Clojure shore of Lisp recently, determined on wreaking revenge. This time it was going to be different!
I started work seriously last week but had a few bad days. I still wasn’t “getting it”, but this weekend, I found myself a new sensei, Rich Hickey. He seems to understand my need for a conceptual framework to hang up the weapons I’m being handed. I may be able to function soon. I now know what “programming to abstractions” means. It doesn’t involve my head and a solid, vertical surface.
UPDATE: In Weismann’s introduction, he writes: “In learning a symbolic programming language such as LISP, however, we cannot call on our experience, because the formal skills for representing and manipulating symbolic data processing is not part of this experience. Thus, we have the added task of learning a basic set of formal skills for representing and manipulating symbolic data before we can study the syntax of the LISP 1.5 programing language.”
I guess that hasn’t got any easier with Clojure
On The Outside 
I’d like to know more about Mark’s comparison of Algol68 and BCPL. Do you have a cite?
Sorry, no. The script would have been produced by a manual typist. I don’t see any reason it would exist in any other form. Ironically, ‘typing’ was also the main difference between Algol 68 and BCPL.