The thing is most people who say things like "Lots of irritating silly parentheses" or think it is hard to read are generally people who have never used it, or

The thing is most people who say things like "Lots of irritating silly parentheses" or think it is hard to read are generally people who have never used it, or at best had a couple of weeks of Lisp/Scheme in a programming language survey course. Lisp doesn't look like just another ALGOL-like language and so it looks "weird" if you don't know it. It's like somebody who only knows closely related Romance languages like Spanish and Italian thinking English is weird because it isn't just a variation of something they know.