Alan Kay on Lisp
There seem to be two big camps that preach a &quot;learn this weird new programming paradigm because it&#x27;ll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer&quot; message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I&#x27;ve found that the ML-derived languages tend to have a stronger type system that&#x27;s more rigorously enforced at compile time. I personally find this much more valuable in practice than some of the dynamic magic that you can do with lisp.<p>There are some notable exceptions, of course, but part of this is just inherent to the design of lisp, and I think it&#x27;s easy to end up with a type safety system that feels more like it&#x27;s bolted on than part of the language.