It turned out that C++ was a terrible choice for the job

… It turned out that C++ was a terrible choice for the job. I ended up writing a complex inheritance hierarchy of expression types, which could have easily been implemented using Racket's pattern matching capabilities. Additionally, C++ requires manual memory management, and this was before the C++11 standard with its introduction of smart pointers. Finally, I learned how functional programming paradigms make testing so much easier, compared to using object-oriented unit testing frameworks and dealing with mutable objects. I managed to get the project done and working in C++, but only after a grueling 40 hours. I never complained about Racket after that. In graduate school, I was taught Scala and Haskell from Cormac Flanagan, who also contributed to Racket. Sometime after graduate school, I got bit by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs hard....now I do a little bit of research on programming languages when I'm not busy teaching classes as a community college professor. I find Futamura projections quite fascinating. …