What is the future of LISP? Should I learn it?

Question

I know this is not a very technical question, but it's for all technical people, that's why I ask it here. Here is my question:

Can someone help me understand the current and future of learning LISP? One of my papers in university uses LISP for a project (it's a big project - may be two semester long), and I am not able to decide whether I should put lots of effort into learning LISP if there is no future in LISP, or should I just learn as much as needed for the assignments and do some other project which doesn't need any LISP. I know a little bit of basic LISP. Please help me.

Answer 1

Lisp is one of those languages that really changes the way you think about programming. If by value you mean marketability, it has very little value. If you mean value as in what it gives you as a developer, I would say that it is quite a bit higher.

Answer 2

If you learn Lisp (not LISP :) you will become a better programmer overall. If you are in university, I believe it would be a good investment of your time.

There is a lot of movement in Lisp lately (Clojure, etc...). Maybe it might be used more in commercial in future. I hope so. Lisp is fun!

Answer 3

I believe there is a lot of value in LISP and currently we see a kind of Lisp renaissance, with new languages like clojure. Even Python and Ruby are very lispy under the skin.

Also the concepts learned in LISP often transfer over to other languages and will make you a better developer whatever language you use on the day job.

Answer 4

If you have a real interest in software development, you should learn Lisp and other programming languages.

Ruby, Python and Perl are distant relatives of Lisp. A bit nearer is Javascript - which is basically a primitive Lisp with a strange non-programmable syntax.

The core of Scheme is relatively clean and quite powerful. Teaches basic concepts.

Common Lisp is a powerful language which has all kinds of 'exotic' extensions. You can experience multi-paradigm programming in a single language.

Clojure is a newer Lisp which breaks with the Lisp tradition in multiple ways, but offers an interesting blend of a functional language and concurrency.

All three Lisp dialects offer meta-linguistic abstraction capabilities that few languages offer in such an elegant way (Prolog would be another interesting language that has similar capabilities). Experiencing that code is data and data can be code will change your view on programming forever.

Answer 5

It has no commercial future but learn it anyway

You aren't fully educated in computer science until you know Lisp.

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If Lisp was going to catch on it would have done so, you know, in the last 50 years or so. You can disregard the people saying that Lisp implementation #127 is going to finally catch on.

Still, it is so unique and powerful that it should be well worth your time to understand it.

Answer 6

Some of the features that we take for granted in new languages had their origins in Lisp. (This article has more information on this). Languages continue to borrow ideas from Lisp. Lisp's biggest advantage is its ability to represent code as data and data as code, which most of the 'popular' languages cannot accommodate because of their convoluted syntax. Lisp remains at the forefront of programming language research, and the next earth shaking language will be closer to Lisp than to anything else! So a knowledge of Lisp programming will keep you ahead in the game.

Answer 7

Lisp's been cooking along for over 50 years. If it was going to die it would have died a long time ago.

Modern languages are still catching up to Lisp.

"It's not dead, it just smells funny" as someone once said (only my Google-fu fails in finding a citation).