Code is communication, and communication needs redundancy for error correction. You can see it in natural languages, and it makes sense to have it in programming languages as well. Using different kinds of syntax for expressing different ideas is an easy way to increase redundancy without making the code more verbose.
Then the AI Winter killed it and people avoided it like the plague.
Today's cruft like you ... Python, JS, whatever ... would not stand a chance in the world of the 1980s on that hardware.
It's amazing how far they were able to bloat up Lisp while continuing to peddle it commercially.
Leaner Lisps running on small systems existed all along, but they would rescue Lisp from the associations brought about by big Lisp.
This is what fascinates me about Unix, they created an OS which works with text and processes, as opposed to binary structures and function calls when computers were hundreds of times slower. Even today the overhead of process creation and serialization for pipes is not negligible, how the hell did they manage to do it in 1970s?
It s weird people prefer reading implicit text.