I'm a Lisper (and Pythoner) and strongly agree, the first one is not readable. I would say it's gross. It boggles my mind that Lispers haven't taken that problem seriously. I have taken it very seriously and have been working on it for years.

I just started publishing my results.

http://breckyunits.com/the-flaw-in-lisp.html

What I've discovered is that the parentheses are completely unnecessary in Lisp, and in fact cause much harm by making Lisp harder to read and maintain in the long run. Drop the parentheses in Lisp by switching to whitespace/geometry for syntactic structure and you suddenly have the dream language.

Your example above would be something like:

  setv result
   -
    /
     + 1 3 88
     2
    8

You might think that looks a little strange too at first, but the neat thing about that code is you can write it on a piece of graph paper, draw lines around each word, connect the indented nodes, and you'd have a tree visualization of your syntax code without doing a single transformation of the source.