> I really feel like you are determined to misinterpret

Why post here, when you are not willing to accept feedback from other people? I get that you have trouble learning Lisp, but I have been hearing the same stuff for decades. Nothing what you tell is new. I had to deal with the same arguments 40 years ago and when you read old Lisp books from the mid 60s -> the same song. I've seen some people getting Lisp and others not. For me the question was always how to help people "to get it" - attitudes like your's, giving up early, is typically an early dead end. The mental block is the bigger problem than the actual thing to learn.

"Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.” — Marvin Minsky.

There is truth to that. People who already have an idea how things should work, need to let that go. Unlearn and start from a neutral position.

> international software industry of buggy, leaky, insecure C code that keeps hundreds of thousands of people in work and makes _tens of millions of dollars_ every year.

Yeah, and I have a lot of respect for that. I use software written in C everyday. It does useful stuff, independent how many problems it has.

> Some of them are the kids who couldn't get onto Computing courses but they are pro Java developers.

I work in a company, which has several hundred people developing in Java. In fact the part of the company I work with is responsible for backend work, which connects several million cars. I've met extremely bright people, doing hard work. I'm not going to try selling them Lisp.

> IMHO the Lisp industry and community needs to listen to the people trying to make easier

IMHO "the Lisp industry" does not exist as an entity and has neither the resources nor the interest to do what. Nobody is interested in CGOL, PLOT or Dylan. These were dead end. Nice experiments. I like experiments.

Lisp people worked on Dylan, when the Lisp jobs went away. Dylan went nowhere.
As some former Lisp people working on Dylan, some are still thinking its a good idea and others have given up on it. Harlequin had several language offerings: Postscript RIPs, Lisp, ML, Dylan, Memory management. LispWorks survived, when Harlequin went bankrupt, because it had customers with software. Dylan did not survive. It was eventually open sourced and still has not much going on.

The non-existent "Lisp industry" would alienate its core customers. People who want a different tool.

You THINK that there it would be a way, but we have heard for decades these same ideas. The problem is not people who can give advice (I've seen lots of talks & papers about this topic) - the problem is that these people have nothing to offer, they are themselves not involved. Nobody will listen to you, because people in the IT industry get all kinds of advice, but "needs to listen" does not pay the bills.

Clojure exists, because people developed it, had a market niche and it survived. In the same original niches (enterprise consulting for web technology, ...) were and still are a zillion other offerings. Every year new and old ideas come and go.

> Recursion is trivial

Then SICP should be trivial for you, because its content is based on Scheme with lots of recursion.

> IMHO the Lisp industry and community needs to listen to the people trying to make easier, clearer Lisps, such as CGOL and PLOT and Lunar and Dylan, and engage with them, and try to understand why and embrace it, not just continually telling them they are wrong wrong wrong.

You misinterpret the Lisp community. "People are not wrong". It's just that the people in the various Lisp communities focus on their own stuff and that's their right.

I have my garden at home, I'm not responsible to sell stuff to all kinds of other garden owners. That's not my business. I'm happy with my garden.

Actually, languages like Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Exlixir, OCAML, F#, Wolfram language and many others, ... they have already taken most of the Lisp features (typical argument we hear: why use Lisp, when other languages already have its most important features?).

You may not aware of it, but languages with lots of features from Lisp are in wide use already.