I’m curious, but my reading of your comment essentially boils down to ‘the actual data in my code is vanishingly rare’. Am I reading that right? Is the comment actually saying that in any given program most of the data is in some structure, but compared to the rest of the code is it almost insignificant? I’m not judging or contradicting, but if my reading is right, that’s the fist time I’ve heard anyone make that point in such a straightforward manner.
> In my experience, Commony Lisp is a deeply opinionated language, and its most dramatic opinion is that "your code and your data should have identical representations and structures." And for the right problem, that restriction is extremely powerful.
Code in common lisp is almost entirely in a tree structure via nested linked lists. However, when programming in Common Lisp, I don't use this specific data structure very often for things that aren't code. Furthermore many other Common Lisp programmers write software this way as well, which is a bit of a counterexample to the assertion I was replying to.
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I think an opinion common lisp does have is that code should be easily manipulable as data. As much as scheme programmers like to call CL macros "unhygienic" it's far easier to write a correct general-purpose CL macro than a correct macro in other languages.
Lisp has a lot of functions for working with linked lists, which do double duty as functions for working with parsed code. But optimized Lisp tends to use structs and arrays and hashtables and avoids creating a lot of lists at runtime.
