>"None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp..."
To the HN crowd, this is almost unbelievable, but it is not the worst I've heard. This summer, going on a vacation, I sat next to a working programmer who's knowledge of programming and the programming languages begins and ends with C#. He had no knowledge of Ruby, Perl, Python, open source, git, ...
that may be due to where they learned, I am doing a HND in computer science and we are learning C# and nothing else...
before i began i knew (well enough to make use of) C, vala and a small amount of lisp and PHP
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The guy didn't know that such things such as open source, git, Ruby, Python, Perl,... even existed. I find it impossible to browse the web and not to run into them, but it seems to be quite possible.
most people on my course are like that. at the start about 90% didnt know what a programming language is and about 50% didnt know what WYSIWYG stands for...
I have a couple of older books that were found in the same manner. From people who studied anything computer related in the 70s and 80s. I lost some copies on a flood, but still have a small, but nice collection. Including one of those "Teach Yourself Perl Guide Books", with Internet Explorer 5 as a bonus (on a CD).
A truly horrifying story!
After a dozen obsolete books on Windows, Visual Basic, and so on, he shouted out "On Lisp". I was already using Clojure at home, and I recognized the author, so I lunged for it. None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp, and had no idea why we had the book, so they let me keep it. I wonder how many other old, crusty software shops have gems like that just collecting dust.