Two points: It's easy to learn to think in ASTs; it just takes practice. No more practice than it takes to get good at any other programming language. Second:

Two points: It's easy to learn to think in ASTs; it just takes practice. No more practice than it takes to get good at any other programming language. Second: ASTs contain no ambiguity. English contains ambiguity. Javascript contains ambiguity. The full meanings of most programs cannot be discerned from just looking at them; you also need external documentation that describes the conventions in play (e.g. operator precedence). This is less true with Lisp than with any other language. Lisp novices complain about Lisp being write-only, but a well-written Lisp program written today will still be self-evidently unambiguous (and likely even runnable) in 1000 years. Try that with C++. Lisp is the Latin of programming languages.