The big insight of the very first lisp is that treating everything as a symbol (pointer) together with conditionals and functions is good enough for almost ever

The big insight of the very first lisp is that treating everything as a symbol (pointer) together with conditionals and functions is good enough for almost everything, and it is as elegant and complete as Lambda Calculus. The pair of functions at the very core of a Lisp - eval and apply - has a deep correlation with philosophy, and captured the essence of the general process called interpretation. Since then lots of things happened, most notably, use of parenthesis to unify the notation (and representation) of code and data for the reader function(s), which, as a consequence, makes macros possible. With macros everything was possible, so CLOS and other "monsters" were created. Lisp, perhaps, is the greatest example of how a few selected ideas (very clever ones) could be put together to create something exceptional (and beautiful) and, on the other hand, more subtly, how it is not possible to create an ideal (unfortunately, not everything is a list, and by adding new data structures the beauty fell apart), how implementation is always clumsy and cumbersome (all those ugly machine types deep inside) and how crowd of mediocrity quickly produces piles of crap.