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Yes, M-x prettify-symbols-mode, it's very cool. For parens, there's the built-in electric-pair-mode, paredit, smartparens, and lispy.

Some languages understand λ directly (and in all lisps that support unicode, you can explicitly alias it) - I've occasionally mapped AltGr+L to λ, when playing with those. It's really nice.

APL perhaps goes a little far, but I'd like to see more standardized symbols in programming languages. Imagine how nice it would be to succinctly use things like the actual outer-product operator ⊗...

> APL perhaps goes a little far

When I learned APL long ago in a languages course, it was on a dedicated APL setup with an APL keyboard.

In that context, it was a "how SHOULD things be" sort of design decision. I know I started off quickly thinking in terms of math and the language, not composing symbols.

Of course, APL keyboards have gone the way of the dodo and so the language has a higher barrier to entry.

You can also use shorter lambda forms: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#lambda-shorthands