For a long time in school I have had the experience of "having to" learn a programming language, and mostly the reason is that "we will be working on a project that requires the use of that language" and, in my opinion that's fair; but sometimes it is because we have to understand the whole picture (like c in operating systems). In practice the definition of a "strange syntax" has more to do with the fact that it's mostly a syntax that has uncommon elements like lisp, and given that in our course we are using clojure, a language "based" on lisp's paradigm, we get as a result a very uncommon experience as computer science students. It also says that usually programmers are "married" with the programming languages that are their favorites, but when you know more than two or three programming languages you begin to get the idea where a language is more effective than the other for certain tasks. For example: recently I sta