I was trying to come up with examples to demonstrate the value of lisp in my own work, but I think this one captures it better. Imagine being able to use your language to create a language, that still interacts with everything else, and express it so clearly that people can translate that into dozens of other languages.
If you were to write that initially in Java or C or something it would be hard to separate the essential complexity (the problem of solving relational problems) from the accidental complexity (managing the underlying language's semantics and data structures and such) while keeping the entire code base clean and clear.
Lisps do a better job of eliminating or reducing accidental complexity compared to many mainstream languages, especially the enterprise-y ones like Java and C#, which are commonly used in CS education unless you're at a unique school or one of the top schools in the US (without experience, I can't comment on what non-US schools teach).
I was trying to come up with examples to demonstrate the value of lisp in my own work, but I think this one captures it better. Imagine being able to use your language to create a language, that still interacts with everything else, and express it so clearly that people can translate that into dozens of other languages.
If you were to write that initially in Java or C or something it would be hard to separate the essential complexity (the problem of solving relational problems) from the accidental complexity (managing the underlying language's semantics and data structures and such) while keeping the entire code base clean and clear.
Lisps do a better job of eliminating or reducing accidental complexity compared to many mainstream languages, especially the enterprise-y ones like Java and C#, which are commonly used in CS education unless you're at a unique school or one of the top schools in the US (without experience, I can't comment on what non-US schools teach).