but the documentation recommends against using lambdas in add-hook calls (which makes sense).

Why? I use lambdas in add-hook calls all the time, because it seems un-Lisp-ish to create a function to be called only once.

naming conventions that seem archaic today (things like cddar).

I remember the bumper sticker “my other car is a cdr”.

Learning a new programming language is like learning a new spoken language: not only does it give you additional skills, but it gives you perspective on your “native” language. The usual way of doing things in C++ is not the best way to do things in Python or Lisp, and vice versa.

One cool feature of Lisp is that the code is the parse tree.