[tayssir]

I concede that Lisp's notation probably isn't common sensical; and that learning it is a significant investment for many programmers, who are hardwired to quickly understand the conventional notation.

However, many important developments in math and science ran counter to common sense. In math, people with common-sense arguments resisted numbers which seemed "irrational", "imaginary" and "negative." (Supposedly, there were times when you could die over them.) Euclidean geometry seemed so obvious that people were scared to discuss non-euclidean ones. In science, even Newton had some self-ridicule about spooky action at a distance, like gravity:

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an Absurdity that, I believe, no Man who has in philosophic matters a competent Faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra...

[brazzy]

I did not mean to imply that Lisp's notation itself was against common sense - just that the article made a very good common-sense point about its expressiveness coming at a price that's often not worth paying, relative to the advantages it gives you over languages with less expressive but more goal-oriented syntax.