Interesting. Would you say that it's worth reading, even if I don't intend to program Clojure at all in the next few years, but I am a Python programmer?
Re:Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure
by chapmanb on Sunday March 20, 2011 @07:25AM
(#2346032)
I would say that learning Lisp is definitely worthwhile and will improve your Python coding; pg's essay argues for Lisp better than I could:
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
You'll want to not just read a book, but also get hands on experience with the language. That's where I found Clojure a good choice for me since I could work on problems of interest to my work and reuse existing Java libraries.
Joy of Clojure also presents a persuasive argument in the opening chapter for Clojure, Lisp and functional programming. There is a pdf of that chapter available for free from the author's website:
The biggest advantage for my coding has actually been in my day-to-day Python work, where I'm much improved at designing functionally, parallelizing with multiprocessing, and building decorators and context functions to remove boilerplate code. So my Python is faster and cleaner; this is all thanks to being able to to think better about code design after working in Clojure.
For a good example of "why Clojure" take a look at Cascalog:
https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/d9Z8_q-Omr35zteJe5cbLr
which leverages Hadoop/Cascading Java libraries and combines them with a Lisp-style custom query language.