>I agree, but over the decades LISP developed significant complications, such as object oriented features How can this be a complication? On Common Lisp, you c

>I agree, but over the decades LISP developed significant complications, such as object oriented features How can this be a complication? On Common Lisp, you can just choose not to use object oriented features (the CLOS system). There are many CL libraries that do not use OOP code at all. And if you want to use them, in CLOS a method is called exactly the same as a function; they are called "generic functions", so the syntax is just the same. >without advanced features (and the accompanying syntactic pollution) I don't think there is any syntactic pollution. Again, in Common Lisp the syntax is totally uniform for all the features, in fact for a beginners' Functional Programming course, he/she would only need to learn: () parentheses for opening and closing an s-expression ; for comments ' for quoting an s-expression so it is not evaluated #' for indicating that the following symbol is a function name (not needed on Lisp-1 languages like Scheme) "" for delimiting a string ... and that's it!! "Advanced" features don't introduce too much syntax either: ` for quoting an s-expression in a "template" way (i.e. for use in macros) , for escaping the ` operator ,@ for escaping the ` operator, "splicing" the contents of a list; for example when passing a code block to a macro. For a language that is really extensive in features, the amount of syntax introduced is minimal, really. Compare with Haskell.