Don't fall into the trap of listening to Eric Raymond too much. He likes to romanticize the whole thing too much, as this quote kind of demonstrates.<p>That said, let me echo some of the other posters: Learning any new languages will improve your skill in all languages. Even if the only benefit you get out of learning Lisp is a better understanding of recursion and linked lists, you win. There is also a great deal of satisfaction for a newcomer in writing a good solid Lisp routine, because you're thinking it'll never work, and then it works perfectly.<p>Where C is so close to the machine you can taste it, for example structs and pointers, and I love it for that, Lisp is quite far away. Maybe Lisp is also useful to pull your head out of the MMU and think at a little higher level.