That's the usual issue, people want their language to be a glorified pocket calculator, so they can type their usual formulas as-is, while lisp rapidly grew a culture of searching for new and larger abstractions. I know some people who would die writing an imperative for loop over an external accumulator rather than (+ nums...) of (fold, +, nums).

I keep trying to pin point the psychology of it. Cause even as a kid, I was more attracted toward HP calcs even though I never heard of lisp at this point, but RPL felt like infinite magic. And of course when I ran into emacs, I felt the same strange feeling.. there's something.