I think another big thing that makes Lisp-like languages (Common Lisp, Clojure, Racket, ...) convenient for this kind of work is the fact that everything is an expression. Having "statements" and "expressions" separate makes writing some programs awkward. I use Clojure at my day job, and the way I write code takes for granted that I can simply bind `foo` to the result of a `case` or an `if` without ad-hoc operators that have completely different syntax from their statement-equivalents.