[capn_duck]

I strongly disagree that Lisp syntax is straightforward. Racket/Scheme is decent, but Common Lisp and other Lisp-2's can be incredibly confusing. Having different value and function namespaces for symbols is complicated enough, but the worse problem is that the simple evaluation rules don't always apply.

The base case is simple enough, the symbol-function value of the first symbol in a list is looked up, the rest of the arguments are evaluated or self-evaluated, then passed in to the function. The problem is that when the first symbol is a macro, you need to remember which of the following arguments are evaluated, or taken as unevaluated forms. Anyone who thinks this is easier to parse because there's less syntax either has too little experience with Common Lisp, or is kidding themselves.

[kazinator]

The syntax is easy in Lisp, but you don't know what it means without having the vocabulary of operators. The vocabulary is fluid and varies from dialect to dialect.

However, the vocabulary part of a Lisp dialect consists of things which are named. Names can easily be looked up in documentation.

Furthermore, you know what is and is not part of the form even if you don't recognize the operator: you know that (fnoozle blub (grogg)) q42 is invoking fnoozle with two argument expressions, and q42 has no part of it. You don't know how/if those two arguments are evaluated but if you look up fnoozle in the manual, it should be clear. The manual will talk about the arguments, and you can identify which of those is blub and which is (grogg).

[User23]

The syntax is straightforward. You're referring to semantics. And in that respect, yes, Common Lisp is a very complicated language. The specification is about a thousand pages after all. I wouldn't say it's more complicated than C++ though, and personally I like simple syntax plus complicated semantics considerably more than complicated syntax and semantics. Personally I don't find separate function and value namespaces particularly confusing, but I do agree that it introduces some inelegance. Then again I'm demented enough that I think Perl is beautiful so YMMV.

Even so there are some syntactic hints in terms of symbol naming, like how you can be pretty confident that a form that starts with WITH- is probably some kind of UNWIND-PROTECT macro that grabs a resource and cleans up after itself. Another example is that a symbol with asterisks for the first and last characters names a special variable.