[martinsmit]

On the flipside, I was thinking of learning CL as a Julia developer and this post has somewhat discouraged me to do so. What can learning CL do for me apart from realising that S-expression syntax is superior?

For context, I very often find myself building small libraries from scratch to solve very specific scientific problems which is somewhat performance critical. Julia has worked very well for me for this, but I recognise that moving outside of your comfort zone is the best way to become a better programmer.

[reikonomusha]

It's not that S-expression syntax is superficial better or worse, it's that S-expression syntax acts as a vehicle for linguistic abstraction. What I mean by that is that Lisp lets you seamlessly integrate new constructs into your programming environment that didn't previously exist. Lisp doesn't have a "parallel for-loop"? Well, it's easy to add one in a few lines of code.

That, combined with the unrelenting support for interactive and incremental development, make Lisp at least a novel experience, and hopefully a transformative one.

[int_19h]

Thing is, by now, we have plenty of languages with macros that let you do things like implement a parallel for-loop as a library - and it doesn't require keeping all your syntax that primitive. It does mean that macros are a bit harder to write, but I would argue that more readable syntax saves more time overall (since you aren't writing macros most of the time).