I can read C++, Javascript and PHP just as well in plain text because the other non-paren elements provide necessary contextual cues, along with nesting. Syntax coloring is helpful, but it shouldn't be necessary.
I can at least understand nesting closing parens on their own lines, the way Roboprog did above, but throwing all of them on a single line just seems like needless noise.
And there's virtually nobody coding in a Lisp that doesn't use a structural editing mode (like Paredit or SmartParens). E.g., any time you type "(", you get "()", enforcing balance.
What we rely on is proper indentation to indicate the important groupings.
Wait, even Lisp does that for me, because it has a built-in source code pretty printer:
Call the pretty printer to format this mess:
CL-USER 41 > (let ((*print-case* :downcase))
(pprint '(defun add-text-padding
(str &key padding newline)
"Add padding to text STR. Every line except for the first one, will be
prefixed with PADDING spaces. If NEWLINE is non-NIL, newline character will
be prepended to the text making it start on the next line with padding
applied to every single line."
(let ((str (if newline (concatenate 'string (string #\Newline) str) str)))
(with-output-to-string (s) (map 'string (lambda (x) (princ x s) (when (char= x #\Newline)
(dotimes (i padding) (princ #\Space s)))) str))))
))
(defun add-text-padding (str &key padding newline)
"Add padding to text STR. Every line except for the first one, will be
prefixed with PADDING spaces. If NEWLINE is non-NIL, newline character will
be prepended to the text making it start on the next line with padding
applied to every single line."
(let ((str
(if newline
(concatenate 'string (string #\Newline) str)
str)))
(with-output-to-string (s)
(map 'string
(lambda (x)
(princ x s)
(when (char= x #\Newline)
(dotimes (i padding) (princ #\Space s))))
str))))
I am kind of developing a grudge against whitespace sensitive languages. Not because it forces the programmer to indent properly, but because it disables my editors abilities to do it for me.
I haven't done any actual Lisp since the 80s on a CDC Cyber mainframe and a dedicated expansion card on an Apple II, so I'm "a wee bit" out of date.
I'm very visual / "geometric", so I like to see the "shape" of things. I can't stand looking at stuff "formatted" (?) in the typical enterprise java (8) "staircase of doom" with minimal whitespace, incredibly long lines, with a few arbitrary line wraps that indent to random spots way off on the right.
I swear, many programmers have never considered how newspapers and textbooks are formatted. They don't sprawl text endlessly across even if the paper is wide, they keep it reasonably narrow so your eye can follow it.