&gt; I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it&#x27;s interpreted, but it&#x27;s not that easy.<p>As an example, here&#x27;s a guide for writing a Scheme interpreter in a matter of hours: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...</a><p>It definitely doesn&#x27;t take it months to walk away with a working implementation. Whether or not the language you&#x27;ve just written is actually useful or preferable to alternatives is a different question, and there I agree with you that communities, libraries, and language maturity can take a long time to build.<p>Lisp&#x27;s simple syntax makes it a prime target for creating new dialects (like Clojure) to experiment with semantics.