It took me probably 5 years of writing Clojure before it clicked. Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages.

It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability to execute anything you highlight

All that and then you realize you can store code as data (since it’s just a data structure) and run data as code.

I think most programmers don’t realize how arbitrary the difference is between code and data until they get used to using LISP.

The idea is that instead of having to learn tens of different syntactic constructs with subtle and often arbitrary differences, you just have parentheses and use them to build everything.

Probably depends on whom you are asking. For me the essence is (1) having functions or procedures as the basic building blocks, not classes. (2) Having all the utility and higher order functions you need to deal with the functions and procedures first idea. (3) Having a very powerful syntax, that allows great semantic editing and is never ambiguous. Oh and can actually be extended in useful ways, without having to wait for a committee to decide upon "the one syntax to rule them all".

> studied them in school - but i quickly forgot and never got around

Because industry lied to you, promising "simplicity and riches". The industry didn't just overcomplicate programming. It institutionalized the complication. Why? Because complexity is a moat.

Complex frameworks need certified experts. Certified experts charge more. Companies built around expertise need the complexity to persist. So the complexity gets marketed as sophistication.

They've promised: "Java/C# will get you hired anywhere", but you're hired to write xml (these days yaml). "OOP models the real world", they said. The real world doesn't have abstract factory visitors. "Design patterns make you senior", but you only learned workarounds for language deficiencies. "Learn the framework, get the job". Framework dies, you start over. "Specialization is valuable". you're now hostage to one ecosystem.

A programmer who understands fundamentals is dangerous to this system. The fundamentals:

- a function transforms input to output.

- composition builds complexity from simplicity.

- types describe what's possible.

- effects should be explicit.

And then you realize that Lisp is the skeleton key. All that above is Lisp, or came from Lisp. Every language is either: Lisp with different syntax, or C with different syntax, or arguing between the two.

If you learn Lisp, you don't learn a language. You learn what languages are. You're no longer a consumer of a programming language or two, or a few. You are native speaker in all of them.