Common Lisp

What is the rationale for progn, progv, block, let, flet, let* and return-from being special forms? They all could be simulated with TAGBODY and a few SETQs. C/C++ goes well with just {} being tagbody.

Common Lisp is stupid.

LISP-family has these features:
1. retarded prefix syntax, the #1 reason no sane person would touch it. Ironically the inventor of prefix notation said ``I came upon the idea of a parenthesis-free notation in 1924. I used that notation for the first time in my article Łukasiewicz(1), p. 610''
2.Parens, tons of them. The only constant in lisp is that its has parens by the boatload, requiring manual comprehension of the ASTs.
3.Freedom to create absolutely anything, without it being  more useful or faster than anything. An academic exercise in 'semantic elegance' (an elegance of form not function), the problem is that x100 more verbose Java/C++ code can be reasoned about and debugged with more success.
4. Smaller size of programs, except that APL is still smaller.
Size doesn't mean quality: in fact the shortest, most high-level program is actually the slowest, most leaky and memory intensive POS.
No wonder LISP isn't used for games or anything useful besides academic mental masturbation.