[lispm]

I don't find it particular simple or a good Lisp. I don't think it is a Lisp at all. It does not even know about QUOTE or basic list processing. If Fennel is supposed to be a Lisp, than the concept of 'being a Lisp' is meaningless.

Actually the best Lisps are those who are actually Lisp (actually implementing the particular syntax and semantics of Lisp) and not a transpiler to another language. This other language leaks on all places.

Fennel is neither a Lisp nor a good learning environment for Lisp. Fennel is actually some kind of Lisp/parentheses-inspired layer on top of Lua. That's nice but not Lisp.

There are a lot of small Lisps which make learning Lisp much more easier. Start with any small Scheme implementation and that's much nearer to Lisp than Fennel will ever be: s-expressions, list processing, evaluator, code as data, macros, data representation, tail/recursion, procedural abstraction, first class functions, lambda calculus, etc etc. There is a lot of excellent material in the Lisp world to teach that. There is even material how to do useful things with that. None of that applies to Fennel. It does not do list processing, its code as data is weak and Lua leaks everywhere.