Wrong.
What benefits would learning Lisp provide me so that I "Need" to learn it?
Though one of the core Lisp/Scheme books now has a JavaScript edition: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-...
Sure, I can create an entirely new operator that becomes valid syntax, like `*` which creates an exponential operator. But why is this more productive than simply defining a "exponent()" function or something similar?
It seems also that tech debt would accrue incredibly fast as joining a lisp codebase would require learning almost an entirely new set of syntax. I'm sure I 'm missing something, but I can't see at all why I need to learn LISP. It's cool, neat, and wonderful... but that's about it from my understanding.
> I don't see why this would be any different than defining a function like I normally do.
Because with functions you don't define any new syntax or implement a DSL; you don't have access to the compiler during read, compilation, and run time. This allows you to easily extend the language: do you miss list comprehensions from Python? Add it yourself with a macro. Want to generate boilerplate code? Macro. Prolog compiler? Yes. Basically anything in this book: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp
> But why is this more productive than simply defining a "exponent()" function or something similar?
It's not just about defining a new operator, you can basically implement a DSL with C-like syntax if you want to: https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax