I can't speak for anyone else, and I'm a perpetual beginner with languages, but for me, lisp's syntax was sort of a god-send for clarity. Whitespace didn't mat

I can't speak for anyone else, and I'm a perpetual beginner with languages, but for me, lisp's syntax was sort of a god-send for clarity. Whitespace didn't matter. Indentation didn't matter. There were no symbols to memorize (except I guess precisely one, 'quote,' which could also be done without the symbol). Stringing code together seemed spectacularly simple: Everything's a list, the first atom is always a function unless explicitly declared otherwise with that one simple symbol, and you could always tell exactly how one function fit with the others you were looking at. I'm not a programmer, but with other languages, I feel like even with simple scripts, I'm always having to look up syntax details or pitfalls. Lisp is simple and uniform. It's good for beginners, I guess.