Because industry lied to you, promising "simplicity and riches". The industry didn't just overcomplicate programming. It institutionalized the complication. Why? Because complexity is a moat.
Complex frameworks need certified experts. Certified experts charge more. Companies built around expertise need the complexity to persist. So the complexity gets marketed as sophistication.
They've promised: "Java/C# will get you hired anywhere", but you're hired to write xml (these days yaml). "OOP models the real world", they said. The real world doesn't have abstract factory visitors. "Design patterns make you senior", but you only learned workarounds for language deficiencies. "Learn the framework, get the job". Framework dies, you start over. "Specialization is valuable". you're now hostage to one ecosystem.
A programmer who understands fundamentals is dangerous to this system. The fundamentals:
- a function transforms input to output.
- composition builds complexity from simplicity.
- types describe what's possible.
- effects should be explicit.
And then you realize that Lisp is the skeleton key. All that above is Lisp, or came from Lisp. Every language is either: Lisp with different syntax, or C with different syntax, or arguing between the two.
If you learn Lisp, you don't learn a language. You learn what languages are. You're no longer a consumer of a programming language or two, or a few. You are native speaker in all of them.