Don't fall into the trap of listening to Eric Raymond too much. He likes to romanticize the whole thing too much, as this quote kind of demonstrates. That said

Don't fall into the trap of listening to Eric Raymond too much. He likes to romanticize the whole thing too much, as this quote kind of demonstrates. That said, let me echo some of the other posters: Learning any new languages will improve your skill in all languages. Even if the only benefit you get out of learning Lisp is a better understanding of recursion and linked lists, you win. There is also a great deal of satisfaction for a newcomer in writing a good solid Lisp routine, because you're thinking it'll never work, and then it works perfectly. Where C is so close to the machine you can taste it, for example structs and pointers, and I love it for that, Lisp is quite far away. Maybe Lisp is also useful to pull your head out of the MMU and think at a little higher level.