[davidw]

Notepad is exactly what I'm talking about. With Perl, C, and Ruby, at least, there really aren't any indentation rules - your program will work fine even if you don't put any in at all, or do a hacky job of it. With Lisp, especially when modifying someone else's code you're stuck counting parens.

Oh, also a weird (maybe crackpot?:-) theory of mine: parenthesis, graphically, don't form a nice, rigid vertical line, but sort of point diagonally, possibly making it just that much harder to see how they line up. In any case, 4 or 8 space indented C/Tcl/Ruby/whatever code is certainly more obvious to the eye.