Yes. Statistical AI/ML can only go so far w/o reasoning. The purists believe that once statistical AI/ML is cracked, you'll be able to teach a machine to reason

Yes. Statistical AI/ML can only go so far w/o reasoning. The purists believe that once statistical AI/ML is cracked, you'll be able to teach a machine to reason, like you do a child, but (a) we're no where even slightly close to that yet, and (b) even so, you may just end up with human-like reasoning (having been taught by humans). Although GOFAI has limits, and will need to be hybridized with NN-like AI in any real AGI, even actual GOF GOFAI is still widely used and much more efficient than human reasoning. All this said, although I love and can strongly recommend learning Lisp, don't confuse AI (even GOFAI) with Lisp. Although a lot of reasoning can be coded in Lisp, much of even GOFAI was not, and still is not. Many modern reasoners are written in Java and other languages. Learning GOFAI (or any AI) isn't learning to code, it's learning to think in a certain way about problems.