> I find a procedural style of programming so much easier to reason about, both when writing and reading.

Then do that.

There's nothing stopping you from using pretty much any style of programming that you like. Or mix and match. Or evolve over time.

Loops, lists, arrays, structures. Simple iteration: dotimes, dolist, loop. If those are your bread and butter, then feast! CL will happily do that. That's what I do. I just don't think "functionally" when I do CL code, I'm just not there yet, so its unnatural for me, and not what comes spewing out of my fingers when I write code.

And it's "OK".

You don't have to use the other features of the language, but they're there if you want to dip your toe into it.

With CL, also, I tend to be really wordy on variable and function names. I'm really fond of kabob-case-for-identifers.