The interesting takeaway from the article is that Elisp is probably the most popular Lisp. That might be an important fact if you're an autodidact. As to your

The interesting takeaway from the article is that Elisp is probably the most popular Lisp. That might be an important fact if you're an autodidact. As to your second point, I think code-as-data is both a smaller hurdle and a bigger part of Lisp than functional programming, which was always more of a thing in Scheme and really didn't catch up to "modern" FP until Clojure. Any programmer can appreciate the usefulness of macros and templates. The argument for pure functional programming is a lot more cerebral. I'm sure I would have been more productive if I only knew one language. The "which language should I use?" conversation that seems so debilitating would simply never happen.