As a personal exercise, you should compare making a LISP interpreter or compiler to Wirth&#x27;s treatment on doing an imperative language sometime. The difference is a 100-200 pages of work. Plus, the LISP can self-modify during compile to add any subsequent feature.<p>It&#x27;s not machismo: it&#x27;s just the design of LISP. Easy to parse, easy to modify, easy to evaluate, data as code, basic primitives that express anything else at least acceptably, and on 50&#x27;s-60&#x27;s hardware.<p>Additionally, building a useful LISP (esp Scheme) is an academic exercise done all over the world that&#x27;s fairly easy even for amateurs. Building a useful, non-optimizing C++ compiler with only a subset of LISP capabilities is an exercise only undertaken by masochists very dedicated to compiler design. Even a prototype is easier for LISP (a few pages of code) while a prototype of C++ or even C&#x27;s semantics is much more challenging. So, the empirical evidence counters your claim in terms of completed projects, their complexity, and features received in return.