"But having one main syntactic and data structure- the list- is what makes LISP annoying too. You have to translate other syntax and data structures into lists.

"But having one main syntactic and data structure- the list- is what makes LISP annoying too. You have to translate other syntax and data structures into lists. Its always possible, but sometimes kludgey and unreadable." I like everything but the quotation above. This is a higher-level version of the ubiquitous "the parens are ugly" objection. This objection misses the point because "Lisp is a building material, not language." In order to use Lisp effectively you design an intermediate language appropriate for the problem domain. This approach is fundamentally at odds with a language such as Java, whose premise is that it provides all the abstractions you need to solve the problem directly. With Lisp you literally have whatever language you want. Non-Lisps leak more and more as complexity increases. Two examples that jump to mind right away are lambdas in Python and generics in Java. In both cases the designers plugged holes in the abstractions they chose years before. Both are kludgey in my eyes, clear afterthoughts. Both features are trivial in Lisp. Lisp is so simple that the limitations never arose in the first place. Your language has made a compromise to simplify these things, but at the expense of flexibility. C++'s accretion disk is a marvel at this point. You can use macros to streamline elaborate data structure creation by the way.