Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.