I'm going to take the opposite position that there is much less special about Lisp than people think. Like I have met so many programmers that travel around like itinerant martial artists looking for true functional programming and they never find it.

To be specific, you can work all of the examples in Graham's On Lisp in Python except for one of the last chapters where he implements continuations that really need macros -- but this is basically the async/await facility that Python already has. The other examples use macros for performance but work fine with just plain functional programming.

React with hooks is an example of that kind of system at work -- the JSX transformation is a very simple shim you can put in front of the JS compiler and the hooks themselves are the kind of trick that On Lisp teaches you how to do.

On Lisp doesn't use the kind of tree-walking macros that really are unique to Lisp. And... the techniques in the Dragon Book for writing compilers are the real magic. If looking to Lisp as an old shiny keeps you from learning how to write compilers, it is holding you back.

I think the homoiconic thing leads people astray. There's a real tension that, for performance reasons, mainstream compilers aren't extensible, for instance you might want to write a

  unless(X) {...} => if(!X) {...}

control structure in a new language and for something in Java that is really a production rule in the grammar, maybe a class to represent the unless block, and a rewriting rule that gets applied to the AST. If the compiler was designed to be easily extensible that would be less code than the POM file for the project. But it's not so it isn't.

Many things hold us back.

The industry has been so traumzatized by slow compiles that trading speed for extensibility doesn't sell to the people who create languages. Also once you have the sophistication to make things like parser generators you know how to get things done with the terribly unergonomic parser generators we have and don't have a lot of empathy for all the programmers out there who might be using parser generators if any of them were built as if usability matters.