[dhkl]

The parentheses may seem like a disaster at first, but one can quickly learn to use and abuse them.

Also, there is great support from lisp-friendly editors to handle parentheses management (e.g. paredit for emacs http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit).

[osener]

I've been seriously spoiled by paredit. It is a brilliant, absolutely brilliant way to edit code. Editing code written in those so called free form readable languages is absolute pain compared to structured editing in paredit. It is a reason to program in Lisps by itself. You don't need that filter on your data? Easy, you just need one keystroke (M-r) to raise the inner expression. Everyone should experience it, it certainly makes me want to write more and more code in Clojure.