Sure, there's other ways to write it, the point of the post was Lisp's syntax, not the algorithm I used to demonstrate some features of it. You could write examples like yours in Lisp or Python, too. As well, your examples both slurp the whole file into memory, which mine avoided.

edit: And your C# version is only 24 non-whitespace characters shorter than the Python version, and 20 of those are because you called your variables 'f' instead of 'filespec' and 'w' instead of 'word'. A 4 non-whitespace character difference makes it exceedingly long and verbose? Or are you just advocating 1-letter variable names and avoiding newlines?