People have been doing this for as long as Lisp has existed; the idea "we'll just use these s-expressions until we figure out the real syntax" goes back to the

People have been doing this for as long as Lisp has existed; the idea "we'll just use these s-expressions until we figure out the real syntax" goes back to the very beginning. If this were really a major issue, something would have been figured out by now. Instead, it's an idea that has great appeal to dilettantes but has never caught on with practitioners. Surely there is a reason for that?