Oleg has worked in other non-Lisp languages, notably members of the ML family. I know that you want to be all pro-Lisp and such, but it's just another family of languages, really; there's nothing magical or special about them. All compilers use an anamorphic parser, a hylomorphic reducer, a paramorphic optimizer, and a katamorphic instruction selector.

It's not about what the language provides, but about what the language doesn't require. Lisps can be low-ceremony, but they're not the only ones. Trees might be universal data structures, but they're not the only ones.