I want a pony.<p>Learning a new language- truly learning it- puts quux in your brain. Those quux are unique to that language. You can try to make do by translating the meaning of those quux into your favorite language, but the fact is that "gravitas" doesn't really mean "formality in bearing", so there's some difficulty in working that way.<p>Consider recursion: Generally accepted you can simulate it with stacks and lists, the recursion quux is very powerful because binary tree traversal is simply walk(t){walk(t.left);walk(t.right);}<p>Recursion is available in many languages, but not all languages. In <i>those</i> languages an expert programmer won't have the quux for recursion and you'll see lots of arrays and array resizing as the programmer simulates recursion when it is needed- and terrible contortions when the function can be implemented without recursion.<p>Without knowing more about your background, it is difficult to give a better example than that. If you know Java and perl, this is why Java programs written by a perl programmer look strange to a Java programmer: The perl programmer is using "perl quux" to work out the program in their head, and is translating them to Java syntax and grammar. I suspect that you've seen other examples you can use here.<p>The important bit: Lisp has a powerful quux in it; it is powerful because it reduces huge problems to much simpler problems. Learning lisp (or inventing it independently) is the only way to get that quux in your brain.<p>However here's hope: Once that quux is in your brain, you won't see parenthesis anymore.