"I must confess that I was very slow on appreciating LISP’s merits. My first introduction was via a paper that defined the semantics of LISP in terms of LISP, I did not see how that could make sense, I rejected the paper and LISP with it."
Even McCarthy initially rejected the idea that the Lisp-in-Lisp specification could simply be translated into working code so that an interpreter pops out; at first he thought Steve Russel was misunderstanding something.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD128...