Earlier this year, I was working for a small software company whose products were mainly PHP and Perl programs held together with duct tape. Our manager was doing some spring cleaning by removing old programming books from our shelf, shouting the titles out, and tossing them in a trash bag.

After a dozen obsolete books on Windows, Visual Basic, and so on, he shouted out "On Lisp". I was already using Clojure at home, and I recognized the author, so I lunged for it. None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp, and had no idea why we had the book, so they let me keep it. I wonder how many other old, crusty software shops have gems like that just collecting dust.