For me, lisp was pretty intuitive when I first picked it up. It wasn't the first language I learned though. When I was little my dad had a reverse polish notat

For me, lisp was pretty intuitive when I first picked it up. It wasn't the first language I learned though. When I was little my dad had a reverse polish notation calculator he explained and taught me to use. I think it was sort of a novelty for him, but when I encountered lisp in college my first thought was something like "oh this is just like reverse polish calculators". There was sort of a strange learning curve for me though. The basics were fairly intuitive to me, then things got frustrating, and then easier again. I really miss lisp though and wish it (or scheme or racket) had more widespread use, especially in numerical computing. I admit, though, that the hardware-lisp gap is bigger in my mind than the hardware-c gap, which extends to more procedural languages.