It's unfamiliar to the beginner and could take also some "unlearning" of expectations how a program looks like and how to program. But there are reasons for th

It's unfamiliar to the beginner and could take also some "unlearning" of expectations how a program looks like and how to program. But there are reasons for the syntax: it allows relatively easy language extensions. The mentioned PCASE macro extends the language with a pattern matching construct. Every user can write theses things. Directly in Lisp, without modifying the language itself - because it is already extensible. The source for PCASE is here: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs-lisp/pcase.el https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs... Emacs Lisp has some well written extensions. I find the coding style of something like the PCASE extension to be quite readable, for me as a Lisp user. ;-)