[bachback]

yes, you can think of Lisp almost as an intermediate language. Lisp probably lends itself well to machine code generation but I haven't done enough assembly to really know that. its not designed for that, its just a side effect of the language primitives being very very short. you can write a basic Lisp interpreter in a few hours yourself https://norvig.com/lispy.html. Creating a decent compiled language takes a lot longer than that. Lisp only requires 5 or so primitives and it doesn't have a grammar.

it is a bit ackward for humans but machines can process it better because it has less structure. for example what I thought is that Lisp could potentially be a great choice to interop with Large Language Models with, because its potentially shorter code. Good clojure code can be 5-10x shorter than python code. With LLMs size of code matters a lot.