[rowanG077]

I think you’re misunderstanding my point.

This isn’t about whether someone can get used to parentheses. Obviously they can. I don’t doubt your extensive experience there. The question is what the language optimizes for by default.

My argument is that S-expressions optimize for structural uniformity and macro power, but they do so at the expense of plain-text readability without tooling. And that trade-off matters in contexts where code is frequently read outside of a fully configured editor, code reviews, diffs, quick inspection, etc.

Saying “editors solve this” doesn’t really address that, it just shifts the burden to tooling. In contrast, many other languages aim to be reasonably legible even in minimal environments.

So I’m not arguing that Lisp is unusable. I’m saying it makes a different set of trade-offs, and for my use case where I spend much more time reading other peoples code in some web portal and with basic terminal tools those trade-offs are a net negative. I would expect this trade off holds for most code produced.

[bjoli]

All syntaxes look like windy grass to someone who is not used to them. I think that, while the parsing overhead for lisps might be higher, there is nothing else going on with precedence or syntax. Reading ocaml or haskel operator soup is in my opinion way more taxing than reading verbose scheme code - if it is well formatted.