[Roboprog]

Back at CSU in the 80s, the Lisp exposure we had was so so. We learned about pure functions and a tiny bit about higher order functions, but that's about it. Nothing much about closures explicitly.

It's funny that one of the other commenters mentioned Smalltalk and blocks. Version 5 of the "Clipper" language I was using at work, which came out around 1990, added (borrowed, stole) blocks to an "XBase" style language. I didn't quite know what to do with them, so I used them to simulate virtual method tables in a non-OOP language :-)

It wasn't until I started tinkering with Ruby around 2006 or so that all the block / closure / lambda stuff REALLY sunk in ("Hmm. I could have been doing this - subroutines as closures, and not just "blank" call-backs - in all the Perl 5 code I've written the last 8 years"), some 20 years or so after I was in college. They did a good job of brainwashing proto-OOP into us back in the mid 80s.

Never used any Lisp macros, but "eval" and dynamic languages sure help shorten many tasks vs static types bondage and discipline. There's another Yegge essay on that sort of thing ("code compression"). The PC "4GL" type languages I used at work in the 80s were dynamic, with runtime types, and quite productive for the jobs they were designed for (pre MS-Windows...). I'm tired of the static type authoritarians punishing us all for the sins of C/C++. (I need to stop before I go into another rant)