Either you are very old or you got a poor introduction to Lisp. It has had arrays, structures and classes for a long time.
I know, but syntactically speaking, when looking at a program, it is always just lists embedded in lists. That is the lack of semantic references I am thinking about. When I talk about being feeling grounded, I mean seeing a distinguishable syntactic structure that gives me a (semantic) reference point for what I am looking at.
Re:James Gosling Interview
by andrekandre on Thursday August 12, 2021 @05:52PM
(#28162028)
this helped it click for me, thanks
For me this was the biggest challenge when I was introduced to lisp: everything is just a list. Powerful, yes, but in other languages the ground felt firmer underneath my feet when I knew a class was a class, a struct was a struct, and array was an array, all with their own unique syntax. In lisp everything just looks the exact same. That is part of why it is so powerful, but at the cost of semantical references that can help users understand a lisp program.