It is a recurring theme for people to point out how verbose a hello world program is in Java:

    class HelloWorldApp {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
            System.out.println("Hello World!");
        }
    }

For argument sake, let's compare it not to Lisp but to Python instead:

    print("Hello World!")

Once you get proficient in a language and start writing larger programs, your perspective can change entirely. What appears to be verbose in the Java version starts to make sense. For example:

* In Java the top level only contains classes and interfaces. All functions must be put inside a class, and I believe this design simplifies conceptual understanding. Whereas in Python, you have a distinction between top-level variables and functions versus fields and methods bound in classes.

* Python always executes the top level, so you end up with awkward idioms like: if __name__ == "__main__": main(sys.argv)

* Static typing versus dynamic typing. We all know this debate, so I won't repeat it. (This is regarding void and String[].)

* The "public" keyword might seem like noise, but in Python you denote private by prefixing the name with one or two underscores.

* Do you really want print() to be so easily accessible in the top-level namespace? It seems to me that the bigger an application gets, the worse it is to easily litter the codebase with print statements.

* You still eventually need to learn what "@staticmethod" means in Python. Java just forces this learning early on.