Good call on the diamonds. Echoing everyone else, basically, your other points are a bit shortsighted. You never need code that edits itself - completely true

Good call on the diamonds. Echoing everyone else, basically, your other points are a bit shortsighted. You never need code that edits itself - completely true. Completely missing the point. Most programming features fall into this category; you don't -need- them, you could always use assembly instead. The point is that once you get them into your brain as an option, problems that might otherwise be tricky or time consuming become much easier. To that end, everything is an expression is a list...yeah, you don't need it either. But, assuming the above (that code that can edit itself turns out useful sometimes), imagine how easy it is to metaprogram when all your executable code is just a list, and you already know how to modify lists. In either case, you don't -need- the feature, sure, but a moment's reflection might open up the possibility that once you fully grok the ramifications, and have it amongst your other programming tools, you'll find a good use for it. As to too many parentheses, as someone else mentioned, foo(a, b, c) simply becomes (foo a b c) Not really any more of them.