[darkwater]

  ? (defun even(num) (= (mod num 2) 0))
  ? (filter '(6 4 3 5 2) #'even)

I'm zero Lisp expert and I don't feel comfortable at all reading this snippet.

[goku12]

This:

> I'm zero Lisp expert

and this:

> I don't feel comfortable at all reading this snippet

are related. The comfort in reading Lisp comes from how few syntactic/semantic rules there are. There's a standard form and a few special forms. Compare that to C - possibly one of the smallest popular languages around. How many syntactical and semantic rules do you need to know to be a half decent C programmer?

If you look at the Lisp code, it has just 2 main features - a tree in the form of nested lists and some operations in prefix notation. It needs some getting used to for regular programmers. But it's said that programming newbies learn Lisps faster than regular programming languages, due to the fewer rules they have to remember.

[darkwater]

The initial discussion was about bash syntax. I do understand that exceptions to rules are what make a language more complicated (either human or computer language, it doesn't matter), but also a language barrier of entry is a very important factor in how complicated a language is.