I think it's also in the mentality as in it's perfectly fine in lisp to use simple lists as data structure, whereas we mostly use wrapper objects around primiti

I think it's also in the mentality as in it's perfectly fine in lisp to use simple lists as data structure, whereas we mostly use wrapper objects around primitive or collections in Java. For instance, you'll often see a "Person" class definition with getters, setters around the .adds collection function. The idea is to encapsulate the collections as much as possible so that if it changes down the road, nothing else is affected but that simple method. In lisp, however, you'd probably just (let (people '("tom" "john"))) and be done with it. I'm obviously exaggerating, but hopefully you get my point. It's similar in Python where I use dicts all the time, but feel bad using it in Java or C++ without abstracting or encapsulating it. It's not so much a syntax issue (even though clojure syntax is less verbose than Java) but mostly the mentality behind the idioms IMHO.