Agreed. Back in the 1980s I did my Masters' project in Prolog (transistor sizing, part of a "silicon compiler") and it gave me a lot of new tools for thinking

Agreed. Back in the 1980s I did my Masters' project in Prolog (transistor sizing, part of a "silicon compiler") and it gave me a lot of new tools for thinking about programming in general. The same's true for other langauges that offer different ways of thinking of about world: the LISP family, Haskell, Eiffel, Forth, awk, ...