Um, no.  That&#x27;s not at <i>ALL</i> clear to a beginner.<p>If you pick up just about any book on Lisp, it&#x27;s all about recursion and lists.  I don&#x27;t remember SICP talking about native vectors or hash tables.  I don&#x27;t remember Touretzky talking about those either (maybe it was just that I had an early edition (1988-ish?) or my memory was faulty).  Certainly The Little Lisper&#x2F;Schemer never talks about them.<p>The first book I remember talking about other primitives in Lisp was Siebel&#x27;s &quot;Practical Common Lisp&quot;.<p>There are quite a few pernicious fallacies the swim around the &quot;everything is a list&quot;, &quot;S-exprs are easy to parse because they&#x27;re uniform&quot; (oh, really?  Try identifying a list in the presence of dotted pairs), etc.