I don't know Lisp, I only tried Clojure but I think this applies. I don't think it's about code as data per se as it is about the philosophy that there are no "

I don't know Lisp, I only tried Clojure but I think this applies. I don't think it's about code as data per se as it is about the philosophy that there are no "special cases" outside the few special forms needed to bootstrap the language. This simplicity allows you to shape the language the way you want without having to consider the impact of your modifications on existing code. Consider the hell C# or Java teams have to go trough when they introduce things such as async, lambda, linq, etc. and how those features interact with the existing language. Consider implementing pattern matching for C# and all the edge cases. Even when if you had a open compiler it would be difficult. Python is no better, for eg. it has a rigid class/type model that has been abused more than once to provide metadata for ORM for eg. I once tried to extend a ORM functionality that was using metaclasses and multiple inheritance, the hell you go trough with metaclass ordering is insane, compared to writing a declarative DSL in clojure with a macro and leveraging existing ORM library. And consider when libraries overload operators to implement DSL's you immediately get in to problems with operator precedence. This problems don't go away even if you can redefine the precedence because it's not consistent with the rest of the language. So what I'm saying complexity is significantly reduced when you have a small/consistent core. As for readability I think Clojure makes this better by providing different literals for vectors and maps and those literals have consistent meaning in similar situations so it provides nice visual cues. But immutability by default, clear scoping and functional programming make things like using significant whitespace and pretty conditional expression syntax bikesheding level details.