survey on Lisp courses

[Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

I sent out a request several weeks ago asking for information on Common
Lisp courses that people had taken or taught. I collected together the
responses (information about several different Lisp courses), edited out
what I thought might not be for public consumption, and have stored on
the file [parc-vax.xerox.com]/user/ftp/pub/lisp-course-survey.txt. The
file should be available for anonymous ARPA ftp. 

I said I would send the results to those who contributed, but there were
enough responses of the form "I don't have anything to contribute but
I'd like to see the result anyway" that I thought I would broadcast the
result.

If you have anything to add, or don't have access and would like me to
mail you a copy, please let me know. 

Thanks to all who responded.

My observation: most of the subtleties of programming Common Lisp in a
portable, efficient manner are not covered well. There may be some
industrial/training sessions, but they seem to be too short to address
most of the issues. 

A number of people that I've spoken with (whose responses are not
reflected in the survey) agreed independently that the only text that
covered programming style reasonably well was Abelson and Sussman's
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was more than
one recommendation that a practical course was to start with that (and
Scheme) and then transition to Common Lisp, explaining the compromises
of Common Lisp along the way.