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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> Is this really true?

Yes. There comes a moment in which you suddenly stop minding parentheses. For me it was when I started reading SICP and doing its exercises on paper. After writing a couple Lisp expressions by hand, something clicked in my brain, and since then I don't need to count parentheses anymore.

I strongly suspect following the Lisp style of indentation and placing parens (closing parens go together, instead of one per line like in Algol-derived languages) is vital to achieving that.

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I think it's just an exposure thing, it takes time to adjust to if you're not used to it, but after a certain amount of time the parens fade into background noise. The hardest part is having to learn a tool like Paredit to intelligently restructure lisp code, but tools like Parinfer are making that transition easier.

After working with mostly Python and Clojure since 2015, I now have a similar gut reaction to curly brace languages that most people have to lisps. I find ClojureScript much more readable and aesthetically pleasing than Javascript.

This was my experience too. I also found The Little Schemer, ANSI Common Lisp and Practical Common Lisp useful books. Also using Emacs for a while helps since you have to work with Lisp eventually, especially if something goes wrong (and there's a lot of packages that'll take contributions if you end up using and fixing those too).

After a while the parens became something I enjoy having. I like being able to structurally edit code, and comment out paren expressions by prepending them with '#_', I feel like I can edit Clojure code much faster than JavaScript code.

I have the same feeling. After spending a couple years writing Lisp code (CL and Clojure), the "normal" Algol-like syntax now feels unwieldy.

> I strongly suspect following the Lisp style of indentation and placing parens

Definitely - I have started writing JavaScript braces for nested callbacks in that style as well because it makes much more sense.

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