Comment by kazinator

> that I cannot possibly solve with defun and for which I would need defmacro

Well, defun is a macro: http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defun.htm

The parenthesized prefix notation is advantageous because it is unambiguous and easy to format. People trained on infix still make mistakes due to associativity and precedence: mistakes in understanding an expression and in writing the correct expression which matches their intent. Their skill does not translate into unfamiliar languages that have unfamiliar operators with unfamiliar precedence and associativity rules.

The user of a Lisp benefits from the development which has gone into the language/implementation. That development is lubricated by the structure of the code. The Lisp programmer does not only write new macros, but uses existing ones, either in the language/implementation or third party libraries.

There is no problem you cannot possibly solve with defun (plus escape hatches to access any aspect of the host environment), because defun gives you access to a Turing -complete computation model.

This is simply not a genuinely honest way to evaluate tools. Gee, I'm not convinced that there is a text editing problem I can't possibly solve with ed if I bash at the keyboard long enough; so for now I will keep sitting on the fence.

possibly isn't easily, efficiently, maintainably, and so on.