It does sound interesting, and I'll look into Lisp, can you give me some advice on what's the best way to learn it?
On your other point, I've programmed in many languages in many years, and mostly I did some in an environment with an IDE, or powerful language-specific tooling (not tree-sitter) that had a proper good understanding of the syntax and semantics of the language used.
If you learn better by video than by reading, the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures by Abelson and Sussman are spectacular. I have watched the entire course multiple times. The SICP book also receives a lot of praise, but I have yet to read it myself. They specifically use Scheme, but most of the knowledge can be translated to other Lisp dialects as well. The biggest difference between the different Lisp dialects are the macro systems and the standard libraries, so getting started and learning it doesn't really matter which one you choose. GNU Guile or Racket would be easy to use to follow along with SICP though.
Also... HtDP (How to Design Programs) is a good follow-on to SICP.
Oh... and I think we can't mention SICP without referencing this (relatively recent) video about why MIT moved from Scheme to Python for intro classes: https://youtu.be/OgRFOjVzvm0
HtDP was written to address difficulties with learning from SICP https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-...
I have gotten much farther (and accordingly learned more from HtDP). It is accurate to think of it as an on ramp for SICP.
A good text to make you aware of the power of Lisp is "The Anatomy of Lisp" by John Allen (MIT). It's an old text but they don't write books like that anymore.
> what's the best way to learn it?
What's the best way to learn programming in general? For me, is to try to build something. Find a problem, pick a Lisp, start building.
Just make sure to have two things: structural editing and the REPL. Without these two, Lisp may feel awkward. But when you have the ability to quickly move any expression around, transpose them, etc., - writing programs becomes like composing haikus or something. You basically will be moving some "lego-pieces" around. With the connected REPL, you will be able to eval any expression in-place, from where you're writing your code.
I started without these and indeed, that was challenging. Having to balance the parentheses by hand, counting them, omg, I was so obtuse, but I'm glad I didn't give up. You don't have to go too crazy - in the beginning, something that automatically balances out the parens, or highlights them when they are not, and lets you grab an expression and paste it somewhere else would be good enough.
And the REPL. Shit, I didn't know any better, I thought I was suppose to be copypasting or typing things into it. That is not the way! Find a way to eval expressions in-place. Some editors even show you the result of the computations right where the cursor is.
I have done years of programming prior to discovering Lisp, and I don't really understand how I was okay without it. I wish someone has insisted to try it out. Today I don't even understand how can anyone identify as a programmer and "hate" Lisp, just because they have stared at some obscure Lisp code for like two minutes at some point.