Indeed; it's one failing of Lisp, in a way: too much homoiconicity is not necessarily a good thing -- you spend much of your time trying to work out where are the function calls, what are the arguments. Macros don't help, as you need to look at the callee, work out whether it's a function or macro, and in the case of the latter, whether or how it evaluates its arguments, in order to know if or when side effects will occur!