And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can

And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can write new kinds of control flow and scoping constructs so you're not limited to the sequencing selection and iteration that the language provides. That's all great... once you already know how to use the language. But, at least relative to the way I think and learn, I really want to quickly be able to do three or four things when learning a new language: sequence, selection, iteration, and console I/O. Once I can do that, I can write essentially any arbitrary program. And then I can start adding onto my knowledge and learning the more interesting ways of doing things. Maybe I'd have a different perspective if I'd learned Lisp first, instead of having 20+ years of programming in Algol derived languages under my belt first. But I do feel uncomfortable spending days and weeks with a language and not even learning how do use (their version of) a for loop or whatever.