Re:Lisp in Small Pieces: Table of Contents and Code
by pmoriarty on Thursday November 13, 2014 @09:49AM
(#8601735)
I strongly disagree.
You will not experience elegance on the level of Scheme from any of the languages you list: not Python, not Ruby, not Scala, C# or Java. I would argue that even Clojure and Common Lisp are not nearly as elegant (though they come closer than the rest).
On the other hand, I think that each language has its strengths, and things that it does more easily or optimally than most others.
Learning to program in different paradigms (procedural, OO, logical, concatenative, etc) can really be a mind-opening expericence, and it's one of the reasons that I most value learning the Lisp way. But other ways are also well worth learning.
You really have to think about what it was like in 1990 to understand the appeal of Lisp. No Python, Ruby, Scala, C# or Java. First-class functions were not considered an important part of a language. Garbage collection was widely considered to be something to be avoided in a real language. C++ (this was long before even C++98) was a cutting-edge language.