Paul Graham's Hackers And Painters

In Paul Graham's book "Hackers and Painters, on page 169, he mentioned that :

Eric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker," and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what languages they should learn. He suggests starting with Python and Java , because they are easy to learn. The serious hacker will also want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system administration and CGI scripts. Finally the truly serious hacker should consider learning Lisp:

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Discuss ...

Common Lisp historically tried to be operating-system-agnostic, whereas the Open Source culture has tended to be aggressively Unix-centric. From that perspective it probably makes sense to relegate Common Lisp to some kind of academic "enlightenment" ideal. And if you're doing your programming at the OS level, then it wouldn't be worth grappling with the arcana of CL.