And you have a good point. Maybe it's a weakness in the metaphor if one can see it either way.

I fundamentally believe that there is no perfect language, instead one merely chooses a set of trade-offs. What's interesting about Lisp is that it is simultaneously well-respected and yet not widely used in productions (compared to C, C++, Python, JavaScript, and even Rust).

It's almost like Lisp chose a particularly extreme set of trade-offs that yield great power but also repel large swathes of programmers. I think PG might say that it repels dumb programmers, but maybe not.