Lisps have a uniform syntax in S-expressions. This makes it unfamiliar to new users, but it means syntax just melts away, and you're expressing the abstract sy

Lisps have a uniform syntax in S-expressions. This makes it unfamiliar to new users, but it means syntax just melts away, and you're expressing the abstract syntax tree of your program directly. So writing code to manipulate abstract syntax trees becomes easy, since you're using to writing & thinking about programs in that form, and it's just manipulating lists, which is easy. For example, it becomes easy to write a program to symbolically differentiate an input expression. You also think about functions as something easy and natural to pass around. They also encourage pure functions, which allow lazy evaluation, easy memoization, and other fun things.