I honestly never understood this premise of Lisp being "difficult", "demanding", "complicated", "taxing" or "annoying" to read. Over the course of my career I've had to learn over a dozen different PLs. Every single one of them was "hard to read", until it wasn't. Every single one of them required some initial effort, and not a single one of them was like "yup, I clearly understand everything, don't even need to read the docs..." And honestly, I'm not even a very talented programmer. I'm pretty average.

What's interesting is that at the point when Clojure finally started feeling more intuitive and I was able to quickly scan the code snippets and understand the flow, it almost wondrously opened the gates for just about any Lisp. I can easily switch between Lisp dialects, as a matter of fact I can do it multiple times a day and the overhead is so tiny, it feels like I'm dealing with the same language, just on a different platform. It's by far the easiest language to deal with, be that Clojure, Clojurescript, ClojureDart, Fennel, Elisp, CL, Jank, Jolt, etc.

I think most programmers simply don't do that. They don't switch between different platforms (and thus languages) very often, they pick one or two, get proficient with them and build some loyalty or whatever, the language almost becomes their identity (at least at that point in their lives, until they find a new one).

And then the problem with Lisp dialects is that they are pretty niche - they are not so widely used in the industry, therefore the incentive to specifically learn Lisp is very moderate at best. But people hear stuff like "how expressive and powerful...", "Emacs has no competition", yada-yada and they'd try to spend a weekend to see what it is about, then look at the unfamiliar syntax and go like: "hmm, I don't know..." They try to learn kung fu but skip all "Mr. Miyagi's bullcrap". Alas, it just doesn't work that way.

For me, it was absolutely worth it. I think learning Clojure saved my career. At the time I was so overwhelmed with complexity in the apps I was trying to build and maintain. I started having an existential crisis - I thought about leaving the field for good and starting something else. Turns out, I wasn't a complete failure, I wasn't stupid, and I didn't lack incentive. I just needed a different perspective. And that "weirdness" and "uniqueness" of Lisp was that inflection point that I desperately needed in my life. Guess what? Becoming a Lisper helped me understand other languages much better.

I think I found a lifehack - want to become a polyglot programmer without wasting ten years of your life? Grok Lisp. It will do.