A language is much, much more than syntax. I showed some trivial syntax, but I didn’t talk about how fast it might be to execute that code, nor easy or hard it

A language is much, much more than syntax. I showed some trivial syntax, but I didn’t talk about how fast it might be to execute that code, nor easy or hard it might be to debug it, how straightforward it is to pull in a dependency, etc. You’re right, there’s little that can be inferred from such a simple code example, except one thing: the syntax really isn’t that hard to grok. With that said, to throw a bone, for me, Lisp is valuable because it’s an incrementally and interactively developed language that makes available syntactic extension to the programmer. This makes it possible to be extraordinarily productive as a programmer on even the most difficult technical challenges. Incremental and interactive: there is no edit-compile-run cycle. Feedback is instantaneous. Debugging is extremely fast. Concentration rarely falters. Syntactic extension: One can author new syntax that fits problem domains. If I’m writing a lot of RESTy APIs, I might make a nice syntax for them that makes the route and consequent action front-and-center with no boilerplate. There’s so much more than just these though. Common Lisp implementations are incredible stable and mature, there’s a huge library ecosystem, it’s possible to write code as fast as C, and the language has stood the test of several decades of time.