A personal anecdote:<p>I stumbled on LISP and Scheme around the time I graduated from high school in 1991. I became interested in LISP from learning about classic AI research. I found a professor my first year in college who mentored me in an independent study of LISP. I then learned scheme doing a self-study with SICP.<p>Despite all of this, I&#x27;ve never done any paid work in LISP, and I&#x27;ve spent the majority of my career writing C. I can&#x27;t write a LISP program from scratch from memory any more.<p>However, I&#x27;ve found that the ideas of functional programming and the concept of the read-eval-print loop have colored my understanding of software design in a really positive way. I remember when I learned TCL in the mid 90s it was immediately obvious that TCL is just LISP on strings (read-substitute-print). Lua is also very LISP-like, with tables instead of lists.