[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.