Who knows what normal means anymore, but it does feel like hatred of the syntax comes up in almost every real life conversation that I have about Lisp with anyone who knows about it but doesn't actively use it. Honestly, I've only ever met one person in real life who actually likes Lisp.

Anyways, here's some hacker news links to other discussions in case you think I'm exaggerating. You can see some hostility exists even in this forum that is built with a lisp variant and run by a company named after a mathematical concept relevant to functional programming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20374782

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502074

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9730277

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550583

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186598