Not just "basically", that actually is the so-called ‘Zen of Lisp’. With something like paredit, your editing isn't text editing so much as manipulating the AST

Not just "basically", that actually is the so-called ‘Zen of Lisp’. With something like paredit, your editing isn't text editing so much as manipulating the AST in a very literal sense. Then you can write macros to do that for you, since programmers are lazy and Lisp programmers are particularly so.