To add to the point about homoiconicity, both the article and my toplevel comment mention thread macros. The article talks about them being equivalent (syntactically at least) to method chaining, which I agree with.

The thing is, to get method chaining, the language has to have an object system, and the functionality you want to use has to be written in an object-oriented style. To get a thread macro, you need ten lines of code (aside from the docstring and metadata).