[emfle]

I am familiar with functional programming. In fact, for some reason recursion and higher-order functions always seemed easy to me (unlike pointers and virtual methods), but I think that's a quirk of my brain. Many other people seem to have a lot of trouble with the idea that you can just make a recursive call and trust that it's going to do what it is supposed to.

Not me personally, though.

But the lisp style leverages the linguistic propensity to give words special significance. We're also very good at learning languages and parsing sentences in context, so the lisp linguistic style leverages similar natural cognitive abilities.

Linguistic processing does require more cognitive effort, especially when it involves something like a macro that can change the context in which it is invoked. For exactly the same reason, most people are more productive with a graphical user interface than with a command-line one. This is directly related to the fact that abstract linguistic processing is more difficult than manipulation of the tangible, physical objects you find in a GUI.