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I know this is not a very technical question, but it's for all technical people, that's why I ask it here. Here is my question:
Can someone help me understand the current and future of learning LISP? One of my papers in university uses LISP for a project (it's a big project - may be two semester long), and I am not able to decide whether I should put lots of effort into learning LISP if there is no future in LISP, or should I just learn as much as needed for the assignments and do some other project which doesn't need any LISP. I know a little bit of basic LISP. Please help me.
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In 2021, this is an argument both for and against Lisp: Lisp implementations are sufficiently fast, so Lisp is best. Modern languages are powerful, so they are best.
It can be inspiring to work with rich Lisp development environments and see what people build when it's so easy to work with source code. It's one of the reasons that so many experiments in language design have emerged from Lisp.
You have two main dialects to choose between: Scheme and Common Lisp. They each have advantages and disadvantages, but the differences between them are tiny compared to the differences between them and other languages, so if you want to start learning Lisp, it doesn't matter which you choose.
Lisp programming language provides good performance when compared to Python programming language. The performance of the Python programming language is less when compared to the Lisp programming language. There are macros in the Lisp Programming language. There are no macros in the Python programming language.
If you have a real interest in software development, you should learn Lisp and other programming languages.
Ruby, Python and Perl are distant relatives of Lisp. A bit nearer is Javascript - which is basically a primitive Lisp with a strange non-programmable syntax.
The core of Scheme is relatively clean and quite powerful. Teaches basic concepts.
Common Lisp is a powerful language which has all kinds of 'exotic' extensions. You can experience multi-paradigm programming in a single language.
Clojure is a newer Lisp which breaks with the Lisp tradition in multiple ways, but offers an interesting blend of a functional language and concurrency.
All three Lisp dialects offer meta-linguistic abstraction capabilities that few languages offer in such an elegant way (Prolog would be another interesting language that has similar capabilities). Experiencing that code is data and data can be code will change your view on programming forever.
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Lisp is one of those languages that really changes the way you think about programming. If by value you mean marketability, it has very little value. If you mean value as in what it gives you as a developer, I would say that it is quite a bit higher.
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