It's common for Lisp newbies to think they can just hack a Lisp program until it works because it's so forgiving. Wrong. Lisp does provide an enormous amount of freedom, and knowing your integers and your buffers cannot overflow, taking the sqrt of -1 just works, and having infinite precision fractions are all pretty great. But you still have to know about algorithms, data structures, and software engineering if you're going to succeed at Lisp.