I came to precisely the same realization about ten years ago, after struggling in vain with the culture and quirks of Common Lisp. There's no question that lear

I came to precisely the same realization about ten years ago, after struggling in vain with the culture and quirks of Common Lisp. There's no question that learning Lisp in some form will make you a better programmer but don't get caught up in the cult that surrounds it. Virtually all of Lisp's innovations now been validated and adopted by more mainstream languages and the fact that nobody has picked up the s-expr syntax is telling. These days I focus more on writing useful code and making end users happy and I've found that to be much more satisfying than wringing my hands over the inelegance of everyday languages.