It’s best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways.
I like Lisp (or rather Scheme and Racket), but I have never understood this perspective. The only thing I can think of that Common Lisp does truly uniquely is its condition system. I feel like something like Prolog is much more profound in the way that it reshapes how to think about programming.
the emphasis on thin syntax, homoiconicity is really no joke to me. I'm finishing queinnec's l.i.s.p but writing some of it in python and using OO requires so many layers and layers to reacreate what is mostly various sexp trees
it puts away a lot of sequential imperative, replaced by functional/function oriented, it may look trivial today but it's been like this since the 70s
and about CL/CLOS, one could mention the MOP, the multimethod+combinations too
One way in which Japanese may more profoundly affect your thinking is -- Japanese has completely different registers and even entirely different vocabularies depending on whether you are talking to an inferior, an equal or a superior, or someone from your ingroup or outgroup (and these may change depending on the situation!). Proper use of Japanese language -- proper functioning in Japanese society -- requires a sort of constant situational awareness of your social position with regard to the people you are talking to[0]. Given the similarly hierarchical nature of Indian society, I think it may be easier for an Indian to acclimate to this social awareness than, say, an American or Brit... but spending years in Japan may cause a Westerner to become more socially aware than when they first arrived!
[0] The phenomenon of otaku and hikikomori is explainable in such terms: Japanese people with high-functioning autism and other social deficits would, ceteris paribus, be at a greater disadvantage than Westerners in their own societies, so their tendency to withdraw and to pursue hobbies they can engage in largely solo would be much greater. The word "otaku" came from the tendency of such people to address each other always in the most formal terms to overcautiously avoid causing offense.
The writing system for Chinese or Japanese isn't as different as you are probably thinking. It's certainly not pictorial. I think Chinese and Japanese (but especially Chinese) do think about words differently due to their writing system, but it's a much more subtle effect. Probably the larger mind-bending effect of learning a language like Japanese (in my experience) is the fact that its grammar is so radically different from Indo-European languages (and Chinese).
Far more interesting to speculate about, I think, is if we could create a non-linear written language taking advantage of the two dimensional property of paper/screens to write things which aren't forcibly constrained to the 1D nature of speech.
I think the problem is that human language is inherently one-dimensional. Spoken language involves a temporal succession of sounds, words, sentences. Even sign languages, while the signs may be 2D, there is still a 1D temporal succession of distinct signs. Real texts involve certain limited escapes from one-dimensionality – footnotes, hypertext (which exists even in printed books, with the table of contents, index, "see page 123"), etc – but, still they are only limited deviations from the essentially 1D nature of human language. SignWriting is interesting as a way of writing sign language by using pictorial symbols for each sign, as opposed to using the written form of a spoken language text – but SignWriting is like the CJK languages, they may be 2D at the micro-level of individual characters, but at the macro-level texts are still fundamentally 1D.
If you could invent a truly 2D language, I doubt the human brain would be capable of processing it. Maybe some AI might become fluent in it, but no human ever could. But even software is predominantly 1D – memory is fundamentally a 1D array of numbers, and in some ways it has been becoming more 1D over time (witness the triumph of flat address spaces over memory segmentation) – which makes me think it might be less than entirely natural even for an AI.
I agree with you : hungarian is maybe some contemporary equivalent of the great language from the past such as latin, greek or sanskrit, in regard of scientific thinking. Nevertheless, its a agglutinative language, and the logic behind is different.
In addition, there's plenty of logographic, syllabic, and alternative English orthographies[0] you can try out if you think the orthography itself is what has a cognitive benefit. Blissymbolics[1] is a well-known historically important one to check out though it's more of an auxlang orthography than English-specific. Some even make them for fun![2]
You might also be interested in shorthands (e.g. Gregg or Pitman) which are phonemic
[0] https://omniglot.com/conscripts/english.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/3pfp9o/lets_see_y...