[globular-toast]

Lisp programmers have used editors that count the parens for them for decades. Many use something like paredit that simply automatically adds the final paren. I've written significant amounts of Lisp and you simply don't see the parens. You might as well complain about French having all those accents. It's just a different language. Learn it and you'll see why.

[rowanG077]

I can write lisp. That a lot of lisp programmers require special editors to handle it should tell you enough. It's not that the language is unworkable. You can definitely write stuff in it. The point is that it is quite far from something that should be written by people, in my opinion.

[globular-toast]

Are you really going to argue that a good programming language is one where you can construct it character by character, by hand? Emacs has existed for decades and it runs basically anywhere. Nobody is programming in ed (well, apart from Dave Beazley[0]). With LLMs the world is finally catching up to the fact that programming isn't typing characters one by one. Lisp programmers have been at this for decades.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rou26TpUG0Y

[rowanG077]

I consider it essential for a programming language for people that it is easy to understand things by looking at things locally. Requiring/strongly encouraging extremely deep nesting is not conducive to that.

This is not some weird opinion I have. There is a reason "flat is better than nested" is part of the pretty popular zen of Python.