So did I--or, rather, I started with Coral Common Lisp, which is what it was called before Apple bought Coral Software.

I found it hugely fun--so much so that it took over my brain. I've been primarily a Lisp programmer ever since.

Coral Common Lisp offered an extremely easy way in to Lisp programming that was also tons of fun to work with, and an industrial-strength development environment for the full panoply of Mac applications. At AAAI in Detroit in 1989 I mentioned to someone that I was working in Coral Common Lisp and a passer by quipped, "Oh, the good Lisp."

It ran just fine on a 1 MB Mac Plus. You could start it up with a double-click. It launched with a Listener window and a blank Lisp source file (unless you launched it by double-clicking an existing Lisp file with some code in it.) You could save an image, copy the image file to a different machine, launch it, and you would see the same windows in the same state.

Creating a fully-functional Mac window looked like:

    (make-instance 'window)

You could populate the window with working widgets with similarly simple interactions. If you built something you wanted to keep using, you could turn it into a Mac application by doing

    (save-application "Foobar")

If you preferred constructing UI by dragging together widgets by direct manipulation, you could do that, too. Once your UI was assembled, you could tell the Lisp to save the Lisp source code needed to reconstruct it.

The built-in editor, Fred, was a species of Emacs, with the Lisp-oriented features that you would expect, but you'd never have to know that if you didn't want to, because it was also a fully-featured Tesler-style modeless editor at the same time.

The stepper, inspector, apropos, and other development niceties all had Mac graphic interfaces that made them easy to discover and tinker with. They were all written in Lisp, so you could use the Lisp reflection tools to crack them open and poke around inside to see how they worked.

Coral Common Lisp made it easy to get started using Lisp to build apps--about as easy at it can possibly be. At the same time, though, it imposed no arbitrary limits on what you could do with it. When I first met Dave Vronay he was working on the GUI for SK8, and gushed about how easy it was to write window-definition resources (WDEFs) in assembly language using CCL's LAP subsystem. He was an experienced arcade-game hacker, well versed in assembler, but Coral Common Lisp was his first fully-interactive assembler, able to define and integrate new assembly-language code while the program under development was running.

The CCL of today, Clozure Common Lisp, is still a great Lisp, but it isn't as easy or as inviting for newbies. It doesn't have the same graphical environment or the tight integration with the underlying system.

In part that's because when the Clozure Common Lisp project was created (under the name "OpenMCL"), its creators had the rights to the compiler and the Lisp runtime, but not to the Macintosh graphical environment. In part it's because modern macOS is quite a bit more complex than Macintosh System 9 and its predecessors, and development systems have a lot of additional hoops to jump through nowadays to do the kinds of things that MCL was able to do.

If a modern MCL existed, I expect a lot more people would find Lisp a lot easier and more fun to get started with. I think it's perfectly possible to create such a Lisp, but it would be a heck of a lot of work.

I suspect that certain styles fit the way certain people think, and don't fit the way that other people think. If Lisp fits the way you think, then learning it is a revelation - it's like being let out of prison. But if it doesn't fit, it's really hard. And those who find Lisp to be "the right way" (for them) expect that if everyone else really understood Lisp, they'd have the same magical experience. When everyone else does not have that experience, they assume that those people just haven't really understood Lisp yet.