Common Lisp is a reasonably nice general purpose object-oriented language. It's big, but it's a smaller language than C++ while about as expressive, and quite

Common Lisp is a reasonably nice general purpose object-oriented language. It's big, but it's a smaller language than C++ while about as expressive, and quite efficient with a good compiler. There are a few real world applications in Lisp out there still. I saw an article about how Grammarly uses it for their grammar-checking service. Small Lisps are sometimes used as an embedded or scripting language -- AutoCAD to Emacs. Not just old code, I saw a project using it as a scripting language for a game engine in Rust the other day. When the language is crafted to that kind of purpose, it's often a good fit. Not to harp on like a CS prophet, but Lisp is basically a syntaxless language. '(It (can (be . maddening))) but the simplicity has its advantages. Ridiculously easy to implement (see niche scripting applications again) and you never get bogged down by syntax when coding. Just functions and data. It encourages a very meta style of programming, often where your program helps write itself at runtime. Even if you aren't sold on Common Lisp being a good language for career advancement (I'm not either, honestly) I do think something in the Lisp family is probably worth learning for the same reason you should learn at least one assembly language in passing. A handful of basic primitives support every major approach to programming, if you structure them correctly. Makes you think about the problem differently.