In my opinion, if you don't learn Lisp at school, picking it up later in your spare time is going to be quite a task.
After reading and doing the exercises from the Touretzky book and The Little Schemer, plus some articles here and there on the 'Net my experience was:
1) Lisps have their annoyances like all languages. Lots of little non-intuitive keywords to memorize, the dotted pairs, quite the baroque computation model (variables having sub-variables, etc.), the FOR syntax, DO, etc. Not a deal breaker, but annoying. (Touretzky seems to fixate excessively on some of these weird traits of Lisp.)
2) If your Math chops are rusty, you are going to have to work twice as hard. Mine are, and I had to. If you are fresh from taking your Computability Theory course, then recursion and infix are going to be second nature. If you haven't been doing Math for a while, it's going to be hard. Another reason to learn Lisp while in college.
3) You can learn the syntax in 2 hours, yes, but to really know Lisp you need to really understand recursion, continuations, thunks, macros, multiple dispatch, all the fine points of object orientation (to understand the CLOS) and who knows what else. Basically, you need to have a deep understanding of, well, all of CS? This is not something that can be learned on your spare time unless you have lots of it.
In my case, I am starting The Seasoned Schemer now, and taking it slowly, under no illusion that I am going to learn Lisp any time soon. I may well be that I am one of those "stupid programmers" that are unsuited for Lisp. Oh well...
After reading and doing the exercises from the Touretzky book and The Little Schemer, plus some articles here and there on the 'Net my experience was:
1) Lisps have their annoyances like all languages. Lots of little non-intuitive keywords to memorize, the dotted pairs, quite the baroque computation model (variables having sub-variables, etc.), the FOR syntax, DO, etc. Not a deal breaker, but annoying. (Touretzky seems to fixate excessively on some of these weird traits of Lisp.)
2) If your Math chops are rusty, you are going to have to work twice as hard. Mine are, and I had to. If you are fresh from taking your Computability Theory course, then recursion and infix are going to be second nature. If you haven't been doing Math for a while, it's going to be hard. Another reason to learn Lisp while in college.
3) You can learn the syntax in 2 hours, yes, but to really know Lisp you need to really understand recursion, continuations, thunks, macros, multiple dispatch, all the fine points of object orientation (to understand the CLOS) and who knows what else. Basically, you need to have a deep understanding of, well, all of CS? This is not something that can be learned on your spare time unless you have lots of it.
In my case, I am starting The Seasoned Schemer now, and taking it slowly, under no illusion that I am going to learn Lisp any time soon. I may well be that I am one of those "stupid programmers" that are unsuited for Lisp. Oh well...