It's the lists. No, not the prefix notation, parenthesis, what have you, although that doesn't help. The lists themselves. In Lisp, code is data, and data is lists. Yes, of course, there are hashmaps, arrays, strings. But idiomatic Lisp code really does use linked lists extensively, it's an entire style of programming. Even if you'd prefer to use different data structures (and again, Common Lisp does support this ),…
I disagree. I have no problem with lists obsession in other languages like OCaml. The parentheses are just too much. I get how elegant and unambiguous they are for computers but I am not a computer. It's like RPN. It's elegant and easy for code to parse and unambiguous and all these nice things.... except it isn't easy for me to parse. Compilers are perfectly capable of compiling readable code like Rust so I don't se…
There are certain things that languages can do that make syntax easier; for instance, Clojure's default constructs reduce a lot of parens compared to CL by using brackets [] and removing nesting. For instance
;; clojure
(defn sum-and-square [a b]
(let [sum (+ a b)]
(* sum sum)))
;; common lisp
(defun sum-and-squaer (a b)
(let ((sum (+ a b))
(* sum sum)))