Well, you need to think that LISP was a thing already before 1960. The only competitor at the time was FORTRAN. Even C was introduced more than 10 years later.
LISP had garbage collection and was designed for symbolic manipulation. Given that programs were just list of symbols, it was fully meta, from the beginning. This gave it a raw power that was decades ahead of time. Even nowadays, this malleability give Lisp languages the power to provide as libraries things than in most languages would require the modification of the language itself. For example, there is library for Clojure (a popular modern Lisp which runs on the Java and Javascript virtual machines) that adds type support. Think about that. Yes, I know. Mypy adds types to Python, but in the case of Clojure the language and runtime didn't need to be touched at for the library to work. You can basically do whatever you want as a library, because the core of the language is so powerful.
Another distinct characteristic of Lisps was the possibility to treat programs as living things you can just "talk to" through the REPL. Programs are developed in a more "conversational" way than with languages such as Java, Rust, etc. Some would say that this is a superpower and other would say that it's of marginal value. It just depends on the personal preferences.
Now, we are in 2022. Obviously, languages have evolved a lot and they are ridiculously more advanced that FORTRAN. Lisps don't have a clear killer feature that can't be found in some other languages and actually they normally lack some convenient things. There is no type system for Lisps that it's practical, convenient and with tooling support. That is a big disadvantage on an era where programs are big beasts normally done by several people mostly gluing together a bunch of libraries with big APIs that you need to explore somehow. Typed languages with accompanying IDE tooling (i.e. having a language server) offer a much quicker and effective way to develop than spending the day reading API docs.
Now, should you learn a Lisp in 2022? Well, I think there are some advantages of doing so. They have a lot of historical value and their simplicity and power are quite instructive, I'd say. Playing a bit with some Scheme (or Racket) can be very fun. If you are curious about Lisps and also functional programming, I'd suggest learning some Clojure. It's a very nice language and it really changes how you think about things, especially if you haven't been doing "hard" functional programming before.
Clojure general approach and concrete libraries as Reitit, Malli or Specter really can change how you look at things and give you a deeper understanding of other characteristics of your other languages of choice. It's a bit like learning some Japanese if you are a German or French speaker. It can help you understand, for example, how unnecessarily complex your verbal system is and how unnecessarily complex Japanese numbering system is. If you are a fish, it's difficult to understand what water is unless you get out of it. Maybe Lisps can be this breath of fresh air.
SBCL probably does more type checking that one thinks. It catches many useful type errors and warnings, especially since we get them instantly, after we compile a function with a keyboard shortcut.
Then we have the new Coalton library, that brings ML-like type checking on top of CL.
(and yes CL still has killer features, and no one brings all of them together!)
LISP had garbage collection and was designed for symbolic manipulation. Given that programs were just list of symbols, it was fully meta, from the beginning. This gave it a raw power that was decades ahead of time. Even nowadays, this malleability give Lisp languages the power to provide as libraries things than in most languages would require the modification of the language itself. For example, there is library for Clojure (a popular modern Lisp which runs on the Java and Javascript virtual machines) that adds type support. Think about that. Yes, I know. Mypy adds types to Python, but in the case of Clojure the language and runtime didn't need to be touched at for the library to work. You can basically do whatever you want as a library, because the core of the language is so powerful.
Another distinct characteristic of Lisps was the possibility to treat programs as living things you can just "talk to" through the REPL. Programs are developed in a more "conversational" way than with languages such as Java, Rust, etc. Some would say that this is a superpower and other would say that it's of marginal value. It just depends on the personal preferences.
Now, we are in 2022. Obviously, languages have evolved a lot and they are ridiculously more advanced that FORTRAN. Lisps don't have a clear killer feature that can't be found in some other languages and actually they normally lack some convenient things. There is no type system for Lisps that it's practical, convenient and with tooling support. That is a big disadvantage on an era where programs are big beasts normally done by several people mostly gluing together a bunch of libraries with big APIs that you need to explore somehow. Typed languages with accompanying IDE tooling (i.e. having a language server) offer a much quicker and effective way to develop than spending the day reading API docs.
Now, should you learn a Lisp in 2022? Well, I think there are some advantages of doing so. They have a lot of historical value and their simplicity and power are quite instructive, I'd say. Playing a bit with some Scheme (or Racket) can be very fun. If you are curious about Lisps and also functional programming, I'd suggest learning some Clojure. It's a very nice language and it really changes how you think about things, especially if you haven't been doing "hard" functional programming before.
Clojure general approach and concrete libraries as Reitit, Malli or Specter really can change how you look at things and give you a deeper understanding of other characteristics of your other languages of choice. It's a bit like learning some Japanese if you are a German or French speaker. It can help you understand, for example, how unnecessarily complex your verbal system is and how unnecessarily complex Japanese numbering system is. If you are a fish, it's difficult to understand what water is unless you get out of it. Maybe Lisps can be this breath of fresh air.