I studied compilers before I studied Lisp so when I first started reading about Lisp it was very intuitive that it is just an AST. When trying to design my own

I studied compilers before I studied Lisp so when I first started reading about Lisp it was very intuitive that it is just an AST. When trying to design my own languages I kept needing to handle special conditions and it seemed all roads lead to either Lisp or Smalltalk. It seems those 2 are fundamental paradigms.