alt Hacker NewsI cargo culted my way into AutoLISP in the R12 era knowing nothing about lisp or funtional programming (BASIC and a tiny bit of Pascal was all I'd done by then). Just using notepad without any assists like highlighting matching parentheses and no deeper theoretical knowledge was tough, but I could see vague outlines of a world of mathematical elegance just out of my grasp.
"Vague outlines of mathematical elegance just out of grasp" - that's exactly it. Notepad, no paren matching, just counting brackets by hand. The elegance was there, we just couldn't quite see it yet.