Pretty awesome how tons of really smart people just won't get over their fear of parentheses even when they know the power that's behind them.
As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.
As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.
That being said, at first the parens bugged me a little bit, but as I got to developing more applications, the more I really grew to LOVE the parens. To me, they introduce a certain purity to the programs that I write; it's like every s-expr is a single thought and every function is a train of thinking. Beyond that, an additional benefit that I've found is that I can hold MUCH more of a program in my head when they're organized this way. I think it has to do with the chunking theory of memory - I don't have to remember the particulars of each chunk; just what each chunk did.
Anyways, it's a big enough attraction to me now that I regret not having them available in my day-to-day languages.