A better way to state this is that if you are a good cook you are willing to spend more on a quality sharp knife.
If you aren't a good cook you'll probably buy the serrated surgical steel knife from the guy in the mall because it's only 19.95 and will "stay sharp for life".
Lisp has a cost for useage. Higher learning curve, Different way of thinking about patterns. Harder to use correctly at first. It's worth it for the "good cook" to pay the cost. Maybe not for the everyone else.
(as an aside I love my expensive set of high quality knives. and always feel handicapped when I have to cook without them. But they did cost a small fortune)
I really think if you plan on programming for more than a year, the learning curve for Scheme or CL is worth it.
I was at the jQuery conference this past weekend, and a lot of the functional programming concepts would be way easier for people to understand if people saw them in Scheme first.
I learned enough Lisp in 3 months to give up C++ completely. A year later it replaced Perl for me. I can wake up in the morning and do all computing within a single Lisp instance.
Lisp has a cost for useage. Higher learning curve, Different way of thinking about patterns. Harder to use correctly at first. It's worth it for the "good cook" to pay the cost. Maybe not for the everyone else.
(as an aside I love my expensive set of high quality knives. and always feel handicapped when I have to cook without them. But they did cost a small fortune)