I&#x27;ve tried unsuccessfully to learn the zen of Lisp.<p>When you read a Lisp one liner, to me it seems like there are many implicit details you have to hold in your head. &quot;Ok after this parenthesis now you have a list of maps keyed by symbols with string values. Ok go up one parenthesis and now it&#x27;s transformed to a list of maps with...&quot; Continue unwrapping for 3 levels. Get messaged by coworker. &quot;Ok. Where was I? Fuck.&quot;<p>Rich Hickey said something along the lines of &quot;If a function only deals with mutability in local variables (for performance), it&#x27;s still a pure function&quot;. I prefer reading imperative functions that are still pure in that sense and spell out each transformation line by line to reading highly compact code written in powerful languages.  Maybe I&#x27;m just dumb.