Worked some more on a toy lisp implementation to better understand lisp. To be honest, I still haven't found what's so great about it. The huge difference is that everything is lists, so it's much easier to make hard to debug mistakes - which I assume does not only apply to writing the compiler but also writing programs in LISP itself.

The quoting rules and name binding schemes are at least as context-dependent and confusing as say, C, must be for a novice programmer. I tried making very few special cases but haven't really found a good way, and Scheme and also @rxi 's fe both have numerous primitive forms (which need special handling) as well.