I think Scheme might be a better way to introduce yourself into CL-like thinking. Spend a week familiarizing yourself with Scheme, learn how to do a lot of basic things in it, then maybe jump over to CL if you want to be more "practical". CL is kinda tricky to figure out on its own. But if you're just programming for fun or personal projects, then maybe CL isn't where you want to go.

I think this echoes my personal experiences with lisp and functional programming. It really isn't as intuitive. Procedural languages allow you to hack away at your problem step by step, figuring out the problem as you go along. Functional languages removes this ability.

but I think I prefer this. When programming functionally, it encourages me to step back from the problem and really think about the process involved in a problem, and when I've conceptualized it thoroughly, the code is really easy to write. Overall, I think it takes less effort and less frustration, or at least a more enjoyable frustration.

Program your own emulator and learn assembly in the process (you'll kind of do this automatically as you define the opcodes), then program your own emulated computer with Assembly. That's what I did. Very fun indeed. :)

Dying? No. Stagnating? I think so.

RoR really made it boom in web dev, and... not much anywhere else.

Unlike Python, which thinks in a very C-like way, which made it attractive to all the science-types and dev-types, and it snowballed from there.