I figured out a shorter answer: It's a foreign language that I
   want to learn. All these smarty-pants through the decades knew
   it and I wanna feel as if I'm a part of an obscure club. :P I
   always hated the language of mathematics - I never liked the
   symbols, but I do like doing formulas in Excel, and writing
   algorithms (little machines) that make stuff happen. This is
   like building a language machine. One of the things people say
   about it is "Lisp is a programmable programming language." That
   intrigues me.?