Most people don't put much effort into it. Since you learned C, Pascal, Basic, ... you already had expectations how a program looks like, how it works and how

Most people don't put much effort into it. Since you learned C, Pascal, Basic, ... you already had expectations how a program looks like, how it works and how to develop code. People also hear that Lisp is difficult to learn and exotic, this creates another negative bias. The next problem when learning Lisp is that the whole combination of syntax, semantics and pragmatics is new. Thus people might be able to read the code, but they have difficulties understanding the meaning, given that prior exposure to other programming language might not help here. They also may not be familiar with he particular interactive style of development and not see the advantages of working with code as data. The typical old saying is that everybody can learn the basics of Lisp in a day, unless one already knows FORTRAN, then it takes three day. The best way to get over these hurdles is to read and write a substantial amount of code. Luckily Lisp has some great books to learn from.