It is a trade-off. Nicer syntax means you loose the strong meta-programming facilities of LISP.

I think Julia comes very close to LISP-like meta-programming, but I have noticed when trying to convert LISP stuff to Julia that not everything is as easy to achieve as in LISP.

I am not sure if other syntax is necessarily more concise. It is just closer to what we are used to. For instance if I write (foo x y z) then that actually requires fewer keystrokes than foo(x, y, z). Likewise (if (== x y) (foo x y)) requires fewer keystrokes than if (x == y) { foo(x, y); }

The latter just looks easier to use because we are used to it. It isn't actually more concise. Nor is the latter simpler. LISP syntax is clearly simpler. We should not confuse simple with easy. The latter is _easier_ for us because we are used to it. It isn't objectively _simpler_. Quite the contrary it is more complex as it requires more different syntactic constructs.