The ability to abstract everything in the language, is what I got from learning Lisp. You can just keep abstracting and abstracting until you're working on an e

The ability to abstract everything in the language, is what I got from learning Lisp. You can just keep abstracting and abstracting until you're working on an entirely different kind of plane where you're now measuring programs themselves in their entirety and assigning a type to their 'behavior'. Anyway, that's what I got from it. As for pattern matching, try something like this https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~plragde/flaneries/FDS/index.html https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~plragde/flaneries/FDS/index.html you'll see how patterns you find by yourself can just be specified and matched, making it much easier to take apart things like suffix trees.