&gt; Um, no. That&#x27;s not at ALL clear to a beginner.<p>But surely after like 10 minutes of doing anything with it?<p>I haven&#x27;t even begun to learn Lisp, just know that it exists and can mostly intuit&#x2F;read it when digesting articles on various CS-related topics. It&#x27;s pretty clear that there&#x27;s <i>something</i> more than that going on.<p>Otherwise a whole lot of things that make Lisp interesting don&#x27;t make a lot of sense. Where does the meta-programming come from if it&#x27;s all just lists? How can it not be horribly inefficient if it&#x27;s <i>really</i> just lists? What&#x27;s so great about lists if really all you have is just lists, anyway?<p>So I&#x27;m going to go ahead and claim that most people that are intrigued enough to <i>want</i> to learn Lisp, already know (or assume) this. Seems like a great hook to start, actually: What is it about Lisp that&#x27;s so great if it&#x27;s just made of lists?<p>Now from what I read in your comment, you got Lisp dumped on you in CS college? &quot;Here&#x27;s this thing you have to learn about&quot; is a fine way to learn about stuff (so many super-useful topics I probably would never have touched if they hadn&#x27;t been forced on me in CS college[0]). But without a personal motivation of &quot;I read everywhere that this thing is so powerful, and I&#x27;m going to find out why&quot;, then indeed I can imagine how &quot;everything is a list&quot; can be a toxic thing to teach about Lisp, in particular to a class of students who are busy enough that they just want to pass the course. What if they forget most, except that bit?<p>[0] except for me, Lisp wasn&#x27;t one of those. We got Haskell though. Except it came at a rather inopportune moment, switching curricula, had to tag along last moment with some friends for the assignments, crammed for the exam, somehow passed and promptly forgot what monads are again. boo, hiss. yes. And I still managed to learn a lot from it! :)