Pardon me if this is offtopic here, but you seem to be much on track with functional programming, so I ask here: do you think that developing macros in Emacs LISP for mostly text-processing kind of problems (like: count the words in a paragraph, capitalize the first letter of all words of the selected region, etc.) is a good way to get on with functional programming? What other problems do you recommend to solve for a newbie? LISP is a must: Pugs just does not seem to be their yet...