You are not doing C, you are not doing C++, you are not doing Java.
This is the best tip that could be given. In the SICP course in Berkeley CS class, the instructor puts it as
"Don't ask me what the language will do if you do something stupid, the answer will always be either you would get an error or the computer will do something stupid. Don't try to convert java code into LISP, try to think in the language."
I had to solve a real problem in lisp before, and I tried, I really tried to think in lisp. But after hours of frustration with the language itself and the interpreter tools, I gave up, wrote python that worked in 10 minutes, tested it, and converted it to lisp by hand. At this point I was left with lisp code that worked, but may as well have been machine code for how readable it was to me.
This is the best tip that could be given. In the SICP course in Berkeley CS class, the instructor puts it as
"Don't ask me what the language will do if you do something stupid, the answer will always be either you would get an error or the computer will do something stupid. Don't try to convert java code into LISP, try to think in the language."