It’s a nice and powerful family of languages with lisp, scheme, clojure etc. Just because people who don’t have experience have the ‘ewwww parens’ reaction when they see it, it’s not used a lot. Similar to APL families (modern versions should be relevant to ML: numpy etc are basically APLs with different syntax).
I personally believe everyone should try different paradigms and languages even if you never use them. First of all it will help you see patterns later on, which results on learning whatever programming language in a very short time when you need it. And it opens your eyes to how powerful some of them are, and even to get most out of your ‘day job’ language.
There was someone on Twitter who was programming c# fulltime for a decade or so, and didn’t know you could ‘int i=0; for(;i<x;i++)’. Then the comments saying ‘oh I thought that was only c/c++’. That is a fundamental lack of understanding; how do they think this works? Magic? When you have seen many languages, you discover interesting properties that are normal in other languages but still possible and actually beneficial in your most used one. Lisp/Scheme deepdives are known to give this type of insight that will stay with the professional developer forever, making them better, not necessarily using Lisp.
I personally believe everyone should try different paradigms and languages even if you never use them. First of all it will help you see patterns later on, which results on learning whatever programming language in a very short time when you need it. And it opens your eyes to how powerful some of them are, and even to get most out of your ‘day job’ language.
There was someone on Twitter who was programming c# fulltime for a decade or so, and didn’t know you could ‘int i=0; for(;i<x;i++)’. Then the comments saying ‘oh I thought that was only c/c++’. That is a fundamental lack of understanding; how do they think this works? Magic? When you have seen many languages, you discover interesting properties that are normal in other languages but still possible and actually beneficial in your most used one. Lisp/Scheme deepdives are known to give this type of insight that will stay with the professional developer forever, making them better, not necessarily using Lisp.