Is there any benefits to learning LISP?

Question

I am a pretty experienced Ruby, Objective C, and Java programmer and I was watching a video on emacs (because I have been using Vi) and noticed that it is also a LISP interpreter. That spiked my interest, and brought up an interesting question: For someone that knows modern high level languages such as Ruby, Java ,and Objective C, is there any practical benefit to learning LISP? Would I gain anything by setting aside some time to learn LISP or not? I would like to hear what you guys have to say. Thanks.

Answer 1

There are definitely benefits to learning a language built on a different paradigm from the one you are used to (which I note are merely object oriented with strong imperative roots). LISP is the granddaddy of functional languages (one of my favourites, Scheme, is a LISP dialect).

Besides widening your horizons, functional languages and constructs are highly likely to grow further in importance as a reasonably straightforward way of using multi-core hardware efficiently.

LISP as such might not be my recommendation to start with, since it's enormously fragmented: on the other hand, there's a lot of history, and you can make use of it directly if you plan on moving to Emacs.