the same sense as are hackers of MockLisp, PostScript, and Tex - highly specialized and tedious languages. It is quite frustrating how this myth of sophistication is propagated by some industries, universities, and government agencies. When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I distinctly remember the convoluted questions on exams concerning dynamic scoping in Lisp - the emphasis was placed solely on a "hacker's" view of computation, i. e. , the control and manipulation of storage cells. No consideration was given to the logical structure of programs. Within the past five years, Ada and Common Lisp have become programming language standards, despite their complexity (note that dynamic scoping was dropped even from Common Lisp). Of course, most industries' selection of programming languages are primarily driven by the requirement for compatibility (with previous software) and performance.