I completely agree, and it’s also a problem that other immensely powerful languages like Ruby and C++ have but Lisp has it far worse since A) the more arcane abstraction features are more immediately accessible from day one of writing Lisp code and B) the culture of Lisp code is far more obsessed with elegance and with twee little tricks than with readability or simplicity. It’s not a necessary issue that Lisp dialects have though: Common Lisp seems to be better as far as culture goes, and Racket has both a more simplicity-focussed code culture and the tools to make the arcane and elegant abstractions easier to understand.
