I've been using Lisp for hobby projects for a few years. Yes the syntax takes some time, but
> I feel like if I used it, it would atrophy my skills in other more traditional languages.
was not the case for me at all. If you go into a text editor and remove all the parentheses, I find that's how Lisp programmers tend to see Lisp, (function argument) isn't that far from function(argument).
Learning Lisp has only improved my skills as a programmer, after getting ideas like code as data, macros, let over lambda, CLOS and the metaobject protocol. It's a simple model that to me shows how other languages have picked an abstraction and stuck with it, but Lisp has all the tools to implement those abstractions and more.
More mainstream languages are great at focusing the developer, and that makes them very practical. It is amusing though to watch many of the "new features" in languages come out even though Lisp had them years ago.
Reading Peter Norvig's PAIP (https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp) in 1998 totally blew my mind. It completely changed how I think about programming in every other language I use(d). I love it still, and always will. And yes, my experience is the same as yours: learning lisp made me a better programmer in every other language I use (especially -- but not only -- Python).
The simplicity and symmetry of the syntax is a big part of that love for me. Being able to manipulate lisp code as lisp data, using the full power of the language to do so, is just brilliant.
> I feel like if I used it, it would atrophy my skills in other more traditional languages.
was not the case for me at all. If you go into a text editor and remove all the parentheses, I find that's how Lisp programmers tend to see Lisp, (function argument) isn't that far from function(argument).
Learning Lisp has only improved my skills as a programmer, after getting ideas like code as data, macros, let over lambda, CLOS and the metaobject protocol. It's a simple model that to me shows how other languages have picked an abstraction and stuck with it, but Lisp has all the tools to implement those abstractions and more.
More mainstream languages are great at focusing the developer, and that makes them very practical. It is amusing though to watch many of the "new features" in languages come out even though Lisp had them years ago.