[titzer]

I don't know why you're being downvoted; I completely agree with this. It's hard to put your head into the mindset of a beginner after it's been in the deep end of the pool for so long. Stuff needs to make sense now and in isolation rather than an ever-growing stack of items that will be explained later. It's a matter of putting stakes in the ground and building incrementally. One could argue that lists and heads and tails do make sense on their own and isolation, but they're maybe not the right primitive, because all the things that beginners might want to use "intuitively" have to be first built out of lists. Lisp is a reductionist language, and that's not good for beginners.

Readable code needs to be not subtle, low on magic, and self-explanatory. The last one is hard to quantify and make objective, but is imperative in making an approachable language.