Not really, since Lisp does not only have function calls, but special forms and macros.<p>In actual Lisp practice, one uses macros, special forms and function calls.<p>You seem to have failed to understand the difference.<p>There are two REAL reasons why Lisp is harder to read than some other languages:<p>* the syntax looks and works slightly different and most programmers have been trained to other programmning language syntax. With training, this is less a problem.<p>* Lisp uses a data syntax as the base layer of the programming languages and encodes programs as data. So the syntax of Lisp comes on top of s-expressions. Very few other programming languages are doing that and as a consequence it complicates a few things. The user of Lisp has to understand the effects of code as data. This is something you don&#x27;t have to understand in Java or Python. It can be learned, but it has to be learned.<p>At the same time, this code as data principle of Lisp gives a lot of power, flexibility and new capabilities. It makes Lisp different and in some way more powerful than Java or Python. The added power comes from easy syntactic meta programming in Lisp, which neither Java nor Python provide. This has also consequences for interactive programming, since programs can be written and manipulated by programs under user control.