For those of you who still haven’t learned some sort of Lisp, Gavin Freeborn has a video pushing the idea you should learn at least one of the Lisps this year. If you already know Lisp, the video won’t tell you anything new but if you’re looking for an overview or some motivation it may help.
The two things that n00bs find off-putting are the prefix notation and the parentheses. Lispers, of course, quickly stop seeing the parentheses and take the view that they’re essentially acting as the front end of the compiler and that this is what enables Lisp’s very simple—some say lack of—syntax.
I’ve reached the point where I get grumpy if I have to write in infix and even C code—let alone some of the newer languages—looks ugly to me. Even if I’m a far gone case, there’s a lot to be said for learning a Lisp. It literally changed my life and the way I think about programming. You should really give it a try.
The video is 21 minutes, 49 seconds so it should be easy to fit in.