I remember my first exposure to Lisp was in an introductory Artificial Intelligence class. The grad student taught the first lecture and was instructed to give us a basic overview of Lisp. The guy, who could barely speak English, gave us a tutorial that could've been entitled: "Lisp for Java Programmers".

It was probably a combination of the broken English and java-to-lisp examples he gave us that created a deep hatred within me.

It took me the better part of the semester to get my head around functional programming. I had to learn to think differently and look at problems differently. I'm now a happy Lisp hacker and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.