However, this is not the main lesson that DFT has taught me about the "real world". I participated in (and survived) the struggle of a small number of scientists to convince the overwhelming majority of theoretical chemists that density-functional calculations could play an important role in chemistry. This struggle (from the mid-1970s to the breakthrough to general acceptance in the early 1990s) was against a conservative community that, with few exceptions, did not hesitate to "vilify" (Baerends, personal communication), ridicule, or ignore a development that everyone now knows was in its own interests. Such long-running rejection of unfamiliar ideas is certainly not unique in science, but I hope that it will not be repeated in the density-functional community.