[ken]

I once took some small but substantial pieces of code I'd written in Java, ported it to Lisp, and counted the grouping characters in each. Java had fewer parens, but many more grouping characters {}[]() overall. I think it was in the neighborhood of 50% to 100% more.

It's easy to prove anything with a sufficiently small micro-benchmark. But "one line of Java" is not equivalent to "one line of Lisp", and even if it were, nobody writes Lisp code in a style that looks like a one-to-one mapping of some Java code.

This is like complaining that Japanese is inefficient because it has thousands of characters, or that English is inefficient because it takes dozens of characters to say what only takes a couple in Japanese. The concepts aren't exactly the same, and you can't just pick a trivial example and conclude that "this has fewer than that".