Education Quote by Paul Graham

A shrug masquerading as a confession, Graham’s line captures a perennial tech discomfort: the moment you sense a tool might change how you think, and you flinch because it doesn’t feel like home. “I suppose” does the heavy lifting. It’s not “I want to,” it’s a reluctant nod to an obligation - the social pressure of knowing Lisp’s reputation as the language smart people eventually “get around to.” That phrase smuggles in hierarchy: there are mainstream languages you’re allowed to be fluent in, and then there’s Lisp, the intimidating monastery on the hill.

“Should learn” frames programming as moral hygiene, not curiosity. For a scientist (and Graham is always performing that rationalist posture), that’s revealing: even the empirically minded negotiate learning through taste, identity, and fear of wasted effort. The final clause lands the real truth. “Foreign” isn’t about syntax; it’s about cognitive migration. Lisp’s parentheses, macros, and homoiconicity don’t just ask you to memorize new rules - they ask you to accept a different model of what code is and how abstraction should feel. Calling it foreign is a way to pre-explain resistance, to claim that any struggle is a cultural mismatch rather than a personal limitation.

Contextually, the line sits in the long-running mythology of Lisp as both a secret weapon and a rite of passage. Graham’s broader project often elevates Lisp as a source of competitive advantage; this sentence works as the prequel: the ordinary reluctance before the conversion narrative. The subtext is less “Lisp is hard” than “transformation is costly, and I can already hear the bill coming due.”