I guess you mean "easy" instead of "simple". "Simple" is very subjective and could be hard to achieve (so is "easy" though). In many objective aspects Lisp is

I guess you mean "easy" instead of "simple". "Simple" is very subjective and could be hard to achieve (so is "easy" though). In many objective aspects Lisp is much simpler than "professional" languages in terms of spec, model, symbol. Languages like Haskell traditionally considered "hard", but it also has a lot of simple aspects - For example, there's no variable in the first glance, only constant. And then it turns out there's even no constant because constant is zero parameter function. At last, almost everything is just a function including tuples which looks like a compiler primitive. Also, there's no such thing as multi-arity functions because there's currying. It eliminates most unnecessary concepts in order to achieve "simple", but it's infamous because it has a "hard" reputation among "professional" programmers. PS: Surprisingly, Scala's has a much shorter spec than Java, and Scala is one of the most attacked language for being bloated.