I heard that before but i wonder how much is survivorship bias :D it reads just so awkward to me as a programming language, even though i 100% dig the beauty and everything that it allows.
I recommend Clojure/ClojureScript. It's quite practical for web development and also an excellent gateway into functional programming.
Here is one anecdata. When my daughter was 14 I taught her a Lisp and then a traditional programming language. She found the random syntax of the trad formatted language bizarre.
Two things were important to make it "click" for me:
1) I realized that "Lisp has many parentheses" actually has it backwards. A Lisp code has about as many parentheses as an equivalent Java code; there is almost a 1:1 relation. It just has less of... unnecessary things. Which results in more "parentheses per square meter", but from this perspective that is a good thing!
2) Some people complain that dense code is more difficult to read. But you don't have to turn everything into one-liners! You can format it into just as many lines as the Java code would have, except the lines will be much shorter now, and therefore easier to read. In Java, you don't have much freedom with formatting, because a typical statement takes more that half of the screen width, so you are stuck with one long column. Lisp with shorter statements gives you more freedom. You can abuse it to write hard-to-read code. You can also use it to design beautiful code that is easy to read. Also, there is a huge difference in legibility of a code that fits in one screen (so you can see it whole at once) and one that does not; and the Lisp functions are shorter on average.
function doSomething(a, b) {/* something! */}
const doSomething = (a, b) => {/* whatever */}
const doSomething = (a, b) => b => “some closure”;
(defn do-something [a b] (fn [b] “some clojure”))
To me at least, (fn-name args) was both more readable and makes more sense than fnName(args) after a few days, and I never learned a lisp until I was 37. Maybe I just found a style preference later in life, marking me as a lisp survivor. Maybe we’ve just been doing it wrong for decades and have grown accustomed to it. I can’t say. But the power of the language itself coupled with the code editing features it enables makes me think that the whole field has been on the wrong track, or maybe even off the rails, for decades.
The JS code I write now is more flexible, more resilient, more testable, and more maintainable as a result of learning Clojure. I doubt anyone can say the opposite: that a C-style language improved their understanding of lisp. (Not addressing you with this part, dear poster, since your gripe is rooted in the syntax.)
[NaN] “kids these days“ is just friendly ribbing. I’ve got the grey beard now, so I‘m free to play the part. Language maintainers tend to be older, and we cause more problems.