Hey you're right, and I agree!

In my freshman year of college, I thought I was hot stuff because I knew C++, so I tried to place out of some of the 100 level classes. But the test seemed strange to me, focusing more on abstractions than syntax. I don't remember if I failed, but I don't think I placed out of anything. One of my first classes was on Lisp, specifically Scheme, and it completely blew my mind and forever changed how I look at programming.

Just before I graduated in 1999, they started transitioning to Java, because the web was so popular. But most of us thought that was a mistake. I don't know if they ever switched back to Lisp.

On a funny note, I took that whole class without realizing that Lisp statements could be broken up into separate lines. Or more accurately that each line just declares equivalences that get reduced down to their simplest form by the runtime. So I wrote all of the homework assignments as one giant function of nested parentheses, even for some of the more complex tasks on sorting primitives like lists and trees. I picture the graders shaking their heads in a mix of frustration and awe hahaha.