if your teammates are careful, and don't go overboard on macros, than their code will be just as readable as it would be in any language. But that's true of any

if your teammates are careful, and don't go overboard on macros, than their code will be just as readable as it would be in any language. But that's true of any feature. s/macros/(splitting the program into functions|using gotos|building a class hierarchy)/. You can write INTERCAL in any language. And you keep talking like it's a tradeoff. For you, it may be. But for many of us who write Lisp, the paren-laden syntax is actually enjoyable: it's unambiguous, easy to write so long as the parens match up, and easy to read if you've indented it properly. And if you've got a half-decent editor, it'll indent and match parens for you. With Emacs and paredit, it's even nicer than many other languages: you'll be flinging sexprs around before you know it :-D. Futhermore, you seem to think 90% of Lisp is macros: in fact, I hardly ever write them. I'm glad they're there when I need them, but when I don't, I write perfectly ordinary code just like anybody else, except that it's more pleasant to write because there's faster iteration, better tooling for manipulating code, and a nice, regular syntax that lets me forget about it, so I can focus on the parts of my code that matter, and get s#!t done.