WebAssembly started as an AST dump, and Lisp-appearing syntax is a simple way of dumping any tree, ASTs included, so the WebAssembly Textual syntax (WAT) adopte

WebAssembly started as an AST dump, and Lisp-appearing syntax is a simple way of dumping any tree, ASTs included, so the WebAssembly Textual syntax (WAT) adopted it just because it was easy. Then function bodies went from post-encoded tree form to a linear set of instructions managing a stack, which means there's no reason for a tree encoding anymore. So the Lisp-y looking bits are mostly in the metadata structures around the function bodies. You could output a lot of formats in a Lisp-y looking way. The language itself has very little to do with actual Lisp.