Your experience in the early 80's has little to do with the state of the art today. ANSI Common Lisp is very, very different from Lisp 1.5.
Just because you had poor (and now out of date) instruction doesn't mean that beginners today would have the same experience.
Did you read Kent's comments about (Common) Lisp vs. Scheme? Scheme is a much smaller language that is easier for beginners to learn all of.
Common Lisp was designed for real-world programmers to solve real-world problems. It was not optimized to be easy to learn; it was optimized to be productive for fluent speakers.
Any serious programmer will have more than enough time with their implementation language to become fluent. The real point is that fluent Lisp programmers are MUCH more productive than fluent programmers in most other languages.
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Your experience in the early 80's has little to do with the state of the art today. ANSI Common Lisp is very, very different from Lisp 1.5. Just because you had poor (and now out of date) instruction doesn't mean that beginners today would have the same experience.
Did you read Kent's comments about (Common) Lisp vs. Scheme? Scheme is a much smaller language that is easier for beginners to learn all of.
Common Lisp was designed for real-world programmers to solve real-world problems. It was not optimized to be easy to learn; it was optimized to be productive for fluent speakers.
Any serious programmer will have more than enough time with their implementation language to become fluent. The real point is that fluent Lisp programmers are MUCH more productive than fluent programmers in most other languages.