In my lab's most recent publication in Nature, entitled" Cellular water-potential sensing through biomolecular condensation", we describe how plant cells directly sense the availability of water molecules.

I don't understand why any of these statements are controversial. Clearly S-expressions make the parser trivial. The fact that alternative syntaxes were considered in the beggining yet S-expressions eventually won only reinforces this point. Simplicity of the syntax was valued (and later made macros easy to implement, etc). Semantics wise, Lisp heavily builds on top of λ-calculus. That means that little work on Lisp's semantics was required, the work had already been done in λ-calculus! Of course that modern Lisp implementations have implemented advanced code generation technology, but clearly early Lisp did not. It was an exercise of doing more with less. So clearly that statement was true in the context of its creation. I disagree with Jonathan (in his later replies) that these early decisions impacted codegen, or that it required hereic efforts to fix in later implementations, but that is a separate statement. I see nothing wrong with his original message. I think people read too much into "little work has been done" where in fact the idea of achieving a lot with little effort was critical in early computer history.